I began hearing and reading about postmodernism many years ago when what I instantly diagnosed as loopy gobbledegook* was leaking out of certain university English departments and into academic journals.
My reaction was: “What the fuck are they talking about?”
One brilliant person I know, a university English major, decided against applying to grad schools because what she called “theory” (postmodernism sports as many names as it needs to addle brains, thus softening them for indoctrination) was now dominating the English departments of any top schools she’d consider applying to. It wasn’t worth it; she too saw theory as gobbledegook.
I became so incensed over what I saw as an intellectual fraud that one night, during a dinner at Dave Van Ronk’s (he was a masterful chef), I sputtered my own description of postmodernism. Dave sat there listening and nodding wisely.
“Ah,” he said, “I wondered where the old Stalinists went.”
So why do I think postmodernism has infected the MAGAts? Here are some excerpts from the Encyclopedia Britannica.
[I]n Western philosophy, a late 20th-century movement characterized by broad skepticism, subjectivism, or relativism; a general suspicion of reason; and an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining political and economic power.
OK, so how did that work on people’s beliefs about reality — such as crowd sizes? By denying, in essence, how the Enlightenment taught us how to think, like this:
There is an objective natural reality, a reality whose existence and properties are logically independent of human beings—of their minds, their societies, their social practices, or their investigative techniques.
But…
Postmodernists dismiss this idea as a kind of naive realism. Such reality as there is, according to postmodernists, is a conceptual construct, an artifact of scientific practice and language. This point also applies to the investigation of past events by historians and to the description of social institutions, structures, or practices by social scientists.
You are getting it now, aren’t you? What we have long known to be the truth because we have learned, investigated and ratified it…isn’t. The other day, an apt memory popped into my head, of Kellyanne Conway describing Trump’s crowd size claims as “alternative facts.”
And then there’s science and scientists like Anthony Fauci, who knew everything there was to know about COVID-19, about how we could protect ourselves from it, and how a successful vaccine could and would be created.
The descriptive and explanatory statements of scientists and historians can, in principle, be objectively true or false.
But, oh no! Not to postmodernism:
The postmodern denial of this viewpoint—which follows from the rejection of an objective natural reality—is sometimes expressed by saying that there is no such thing as Truth…
Postmodernists deny this Enlightenment faith in science and technology as instruments of human progress...Some go so far as to say that science and technology—and even reason and logic—are inherently destructive and oppressive, because they have been used by evil people, especially during the 20th century, to destroy and oppress others. [My bolding.]
One more important contrast between our thinking, a/k/a Enlightenment, and postmodernism is in the subject of language. Moreover, the Britannica’s painful and painstaking summary of what postmodernism believes is, I think, the essence of postmodernism. See above, where I wrote “What the fuck are they saying?”
Language refers to and represents a reality outside itself.
[P]ostmodernists claim that language is semantically self-contained, or self-referential: the meaning of a word is not a static thing in the world or even an idea in the mind but rather a range of contrasts and differences with the meanings of other words. Because meanings are in this sense functions of other meanings—which themselves are functions of other meanings, and so on—they are never fully “present” to the speaker or hearer but are endlessly “deferred.”
Don’t drive yourself crazy trying to understand that. It’s bad enough that I have to deconstruct the thoughts of a range of supersmart journalists and pundits who went to a short list of top universities which promulgated postmodernism.
But you can understand how anyone who preaches simplistic, crazy and demonstrably false nonsense (anti-vaccination, for example) could become an intellectual messiah to people who are fed up with complex theories outside their capacity to comprehend. Thus, MAGAts.
Personally, I believe postmodernism has crept into a cave in recent years, and I attribute this to Alan Sokal, a dazzlingly smart physicist (with a side gig in parody) who taught at New York University in the 1990s. Here’s what the back page from his book, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science (cowritten by Belgian physicist, Jean Bricmont), says he did:
In 1996, Alan Sokal published an essay in the hip intellectual magazine [i.e., postmodernist and deconstructionist] Social Text parodying the scientific but impenetrable lingo of contemporary theorists. On the heels of the fierce academic debate that followed the hoax, Sokal teams with Jean Bricmont to expose the abuse of scientific concepts in the writings of today’s most fashionable postmodern thinkers.
What happened exposed postmodernism for its (a) inanity and (b) absence of any sense of humor. Because they bought Sokal’s argument — which, as far as I can make out “proved” there was no such thing as scientific truth — completely. They had been publicly exposed as fools.
In a squib for Fashionable Nonsense, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote, “A thoroughly hilarious romp through the postmodernist academy. Fashionable Nonsense delivers the perfect coup de grace.” (Perhaps a little in-joke there with that “coup de grace,” because almost all of these “philosophers” were/are French.)
Post Script. Years ago, I was in a large jury pool for a criminal case. When a jury-sized group was called for voir dire, I recognized Alan Sokal’s name and got very excited. During a break, I did something so uncharacteristic of me, I still can’t believe it. I rushed up to him in the hallway and blubbered my admiration. He looked…I don’t know…maybe scared. Although he thanked me. I think.
I’m still embarassed.
* Credit to Chief Justice John Roberts, who used the word in his lousy decision on gerrymandering in Wisconsin.