I began my last post by asking how we had come to a point where so many ask, “what happened to civility?” or “how has our society become so often mean-spirited and nasty?” Or what of flare-ups of aggression on roadways, in airplanes, in classrooms and in civic spaces?
Acknowledging that there is neither a single cause nor are there simple answers, I said that the philosophical movement known as post-modernism had something to do with it.
To be clear, I am not suggesting that the guy menacingly tailgating you in a huge, black, V-8 pick-up every window dark and opaque, nor the person sweeping (shoplifting) goods off the shelves at the neighborhood drug story while muttering profanities at the clerk have all been studying French post-modernist philosophers.
No, but the ideas of those thinkers, as well as the way people have applied them, have contributed to an ethos which of eroded norms, civility, and common decency.
I cited Brooking Institution scholar Jonathan Rauch and his recent essay, “The Woke Right Stands at the Door,” for this thumb-nail description of post-modernism: “[Post-modernism] adopts a radically skeptical epistemology, viewing all claims to capital-T truth . . . as assertions of power: efforts by dominant social actors to impose and legitimize their own, often oppressive, agendas. Wherever you see a truth claim, you should unmask it: look behind it to see whom it might benefit . . .”
In the part of the academic world I know best this maneuver is known as “the hermeneutics of suspicion,” meaning your interpretative standpoint is always to be one of suspicion. You look for the oppressive (racist, sexist, homophobic, capitalist) agenda behind any truth claim. In theological circles this was the m.o. of the much publicized “Jesus Seminar,” ascendant in the 1990s. The Seminar’s scholars looked for an “historical Jesus,” (one who was more to their liking) — hidden, they darkly contended, by the church’s orthodox faith and creeds.
As another example, a truth claim (from the Declaration of Independence) is: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
In the hands of a post-modernist this would be a rhetorical mask for the self-interests of powerful property-owning white men — and not a whit more. Yes, there is some truth in such a critique, but to entirely discount something so revolutionary in its time as merely self-serving BS is wildly reductive and absurd. Moreover, it deprives us of an ideal, not fully realized to be sure, but toward which we are be called to work and progress. It was in this way that Martin Luther King Jr. treated the Declaration’s truth claims.
Perhaps like a few of you, I had my own sophomoric “post-modern” phase (which, alas, endured far longer than my sophomore year of college). A professor I respected listened to my incessant and self-righteous negativity about almost everything. After a while he remarked, drolly, “People tend to be more interested in what you are for than what you are against.” The slap of a Zen master!
Or as Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn once remarked, “Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one.” We seem these days to be a lot better at the kicking down than the building up. In a sense post-modernism was all about kicking things down.
In Stephen Hicks’s 2004 book Explaining Postmodernism, he writes: “Principles of civility and procedural justice simply serve [according to post-modern theory] 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. … Having rejected reason, we will not expect ourselves or others to behave reasonably.”
Does that sound anything like the world you and I are living in today?
Rauch in “The Woke Right Stands at the Door” is making the point that two can play this game. While it was the left that adopted the post-modern tactics earliest, and the right has, at least for a least a decade now, been working from the same playbook.
As one example, Vice-Presidential candidate J. D. Vance’s response when he was accused of concocting the stories of immigrants eating people’s pets in Ohio. “If I have to create stories,” barked Vance, “so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” The cause is so important, that the facts — reality — don’t really matter.
“Likewise,” continues Rauch, “the postmodern right shares its left-wing counterpart’s contempt for expertise, which it views as a tool for elite domination of discourse. In that respect, the appointment of the conspiracy-minded Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the Department of Health and Human Services has a distinctly postmodern flavor; the same can be said for other Trump appointees and influencers who peddle groundless claims and conspiracy theories.”
“Sheer aggressiveness,” writes Rauch, “is perhaps the postmodern left’s and right’s most salient feature . . . their signature style of no-holds-barred aggression was observed on the left more than 20 years ago by Hicks, in Explaining Postmodernism. “Postmodernists,” he wrote in 2004, “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 to enact ‘politically correct’ authoritarian measures, and the most likely to use anger and rage as argumentative tactics.”
To which Rauch adds, “Delete ‘politically correct’ and you have a pitch-perfect description of the postmodern right.”
My point is not to launch a witch-hunt for post-modernists. It is to try to get a handle on how the view that there’s no truth, only power, and the posture of radical skepticism devolve into a cynicism that is corrosive to the soul and to society.
Cynicism, what’s left after the barn has been kicked down, sees everyone as motivated always and everywhere by self-interest. Add in the “sheer-aggressiveness” that is the “postmodern left’s and right’s most salient feature” and you end up with the a society that seems to have become pretty mean-spirited and nasty — one where virtues like altruism, service, moderation or idealism are for chumps.
What then is to be done? I’ll let Jonathan Rauch answer that.
“For liberal and traditionalist opponents of the right-postmodern onslaught, the imperative now is to do what liberals and moderates failed to do when the postmodern left rushed academia: recognize the radicalism, nihilism, and revolutionary ruthlessness of the postmodern phenomenon; organize aggressively to stall and then defeat it; and tirelessly expose it as self-serving, parasitic, and hollow. In other words, as postmodernists love to say—unmask it.”
A couple weeks ago I wrote of the erosion of social order as “the Big Issue.” I quoted David Brooks, “All humans need to grow up in a secure container, within which they can craft their lives. The social order consists of a stable family, a safe and coherent neighborhood, a vibrant congregational and civic life, a reliable body of laws, a set of shared values that neighbors can use to build healthy communities and a conviction that there exists moral truth.” Sadly, we are very far from that.
Rauch writes, “Radical skepticism is like the acid that eats through every container.” And so we now “reap the whirlwind.”
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