Some thoughts on The Postmodern Condition

Postmodernism was the bogeyman of the late ‘90s and early 2000s among evangelicals and other conservatives. In much the same way that one’s response to Critical Race Theory (which has some connections with postmodernity) serves as a shibboleth for acceptability in trendy circles, postmodernism functioned as a way to be part of the cool kids (on either side).

There are now those that think that postmodernism is really just another form of modernity (perhaps further advanced along its trajectory), and thus never really existed as a distinct movement, but there was something that adherents and opponents felt was different from the general stream of modernity, which still deserves some attention. With that in mind, I picked up, Jean-Francois Lyotard’s book, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, to try to get a better understanding from the horse’s mouth, as it were.

Lyotard offers a definition in his introduction: “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.”

In other words, Lyotard was arguing that modernity attempted to impose homogeneity on the world through metanarratives—high level explanations that were an attempt to make sense of everything. Postmodernity claims to recognize metanarratives as impositions from authorities that likely have little claim to correspondence to the truth.

At its best, postmodernity shakes the claims of modernistic empiricism, which leads to the apparent supremacy of “Science.” Postmodernity did not succeed in uprooting the religion of Scientism, as evidenced by the year of shaming that we “follow the Science” or “believe in the Science” or “listen to the Science.” In general, when someone puts a definite article in front of “Science” they are no longer talking about actual science, but about how they intend to try to browbeat you into doing what they want to. We are still very much living in an era where people believe that “Science” has or can produce a unified theory of everything. This despite Thomas Kuhn’s work in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which shows a truer picture of the way the scientific community develops metanarratives that evolve over time.

By Lyotard offers some helpful analysis beyond his definition of postmodernism. Though The Postmodern Condition was written in 1979, he predicted the information age with a surprising degree of prescience.

For example, he wrote,

“Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major—perhaps the major—stake in the worldwide competition for power. It is conceivable that the nation-states will one day fight for control of information, just as they battled in the past for control over territory, and afterwards for control of access to and exploitation of raw materials and cheap labor.”

There are obvious connections to information warfare, the psyops that are ongoing with bots on social media, election interference, etc. The fact that there are operatives from other nations whose primary goal is to stir up dissent and doubt among citizens of the United States is an illustration of Lyotard’s prediction.

Also, significantly for the concept of education and the role of the state, Lyotard anticipated the shifting role of the state with regard to education:

“The mercantilization of knowledge is bound to affect the privilege the nation-states have enjoyed, and still enjoy, with respect to the production and distribution of learning. The notion that learning falls within the purview of the State, as the brain or mind of society, will become more and more outdated with the increasing strength of the opposing principle, according to which society exists and progresses only if the messages circulating within it are rich and easy to decode. The ideology of communicational “transparence,” which goes hand in hand with the commercialization of knowledge, will begin to perceive the State as a factor of opacity and “noise.” It is from this point of view that the problem of the relationship between economic and State powers threatens to arise with a new urgency.”

It isn’t entirely a bad thing when the State is no longer perceived as “the brain or mind of society,” since the State has been significantly wrong about a number of life changing issues in the not-so-distant past. However, within Lyotard’s prediction is the anticipation of QAnon and similar conspiracy theories, which see a “Deep State” that is controlling the narrative. This has effectively made Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other outlets the de facto gatekeepers of truth, as congressional hearings and obnoxious overlays on social media posts frequently remind us.

It is interesting to read The Postmodern Condition at this point, to see how many of Lyotard’s anticipated realities have come true. As a description of reality, he is on the right track. He does little to help find a way to navigate through toward some better condition, but there is some value in the diagnosis.

Breaking Bread with the Dead

The life of the mind is a topic of growing significance as the pace of change, with its assaults on our mental stability, continue to accelerate. Some sources estimate there are more than 2 million books published worldwide each year. And that volume of content is in addition to the newspapers, magazines, blogs, tweets, and emails that also vie for our time.

Along with the flash and glamour of new publications, our attention is also directed to “old books,” which are often celebrated as “classics” that are critical to becoming properly formed as humans or derided as elements of a “racist patriarchy” that must be resisted by any means and at any cost.

In three books, written through the last decade, Alan Jacobs has drafted a series of books that wrestle with the life of the mind, the nature of reading, and value of ancient literary history. This is an odd series. Each book comes from a different publisher, has a distinct thesis, and wrestles with a different topic. There is no thematic unity and little hope of a boxed set, which seems to be the hallmark of such sequences in our day. The progression of topics, too, does not seem as unified as one might expect.

And yet, Jacobs admits that these books are in a series, and that they are related, as disparate as they may seem. The careful reader will, indeed, find that there is a connection between them all. Not a connection that requires reading the books in sequence, but that these are markers, perhaps, staking out the boundaries of a mind alive to the unity of the world and its possibilities. The series is by no means complete, so it will not surprise me to find another short book set out to help readers navigate the modern world, published in a few more years.

Jacobs is, by profession, a teacher of literature. He has also done significant work as a cultural critic. In this he is much like C. S. Lewis, a thinker with whom Jacobs has demonstrated significant interest and expertise. It is not difficult, as a result, to find echoes of Lewis throughout Jacobs’ work, especially in this latest book, Breaking Bread with the Dead, which shares a common theme with Lewis’ essay, “On the Reading of Old Books.”

Breaking Bread with the Dead obviously comes out in favor of reading old books. But read in context with The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, it is abundantly clear that Jacobs is not advertising the “checklist” approach of slogging through “Greats,” which is a quest to max out your score on Facebook quizzes and a recipe for gobbling a gourmet feast without savoring the marinated centuries between works—in other words, it represents the sin of gluttony. Rather, he is arguing that reading old books is necessary to understand our times and to live in them.

Jacobs clearly states this goal toward the end of his introduction,

To open yourself to the past is to make yourself less vulnerable to the cruelties of descending in tweeted wrath on a young woman whose clothing you disapprove of, or firing an employee because of a tween you didn’t take time to understand, or responding to climate change either by ignoring it or by indulging in impotent rage. You realize that you need to obey the impulses of this moment—which, it is fair to say, never tend to produce a tranquil mind.

This book is an essay that wanders toward a single goal, rather than an argument with chapters neatly divided into segments of support and refutation. It is a literary essay that seeks to deal with the questions of the day. One of the most pertinent questions for our tiny historical moment is whether one dare to read authors whose social and moral views differ—whether greatly or radically—from our own.

Jacobs begins by examining the problem of presentism, which is the tendency to see our particular cultural moment as the moral apex of humanity and to denigrate all who have ever had a differing opinion. Thus, the reading of Robinson Crusoe must be abandoned because it is racist, sexist, colonial, and a bunch of other bad things that are native and irrevocably attached to old, dead, white men. Jacobs argues that in order to properly understand our own moment, we must interact with minds that came before our moment, even when they do, in fact, have racist, sexist, and colonial ideas.

The concept for engaging with those we disagree with is represented as “table fellowship,” which is obviously conveyed by the title of the book. Jacobs understands this has the center of the book: “sitting at the table with our ancestors and learning to know them in their difference from, as well as their likeness to, us.” He argues that reading even those with whom we disagree—by inviting them to our table—we open ourselves up to a greater understanding of their time and ours. But at the same time, since we invite these sometimes-scraggly guests through the practice of reading, we control the interaction, so that when they get to rowdy we can, with little effort, simply disinvite them from the meal by closing the book and moving to another guest.

Breaking bread with the dead offers us challenges to our own worldview—exactly the reason many activist “academics” want them “cancelled”—and force us to examine our unexamined assumptions. They also force us to wrestle with the reality that our morality du jour has some of the same barbarities of a previous age (albeit with a different shade of lipstick) and that it sometimes is a positive logical outcome of a trajectory we might find in older literature, if we but take the time to consider it. Reading old books helps us to understand ourselves and our time better.

As morality has become increasingly unpinned from any sense of permanence or overt morality, the pace of change from one absolute standard to another has become exhausting. A group of racist trolls on a social media site turn the “OK” symbol into a symbol for “white power” and suddenly everyone who uses the symbol, with its long-standing cultural significance, is now complicit in white supremacy. Unless, of course, someone who is of the right color or political affiliation uses it, in which case it means what it has consistently meant. The tyranny of the present undermines every sense of peace. As Jacobs argues, reading old books is the best way to remind ourselves of our own finitude, the temporary nature of our culture’s moral conclusions, and deepens our souls to better understand those who differ from us. In other words, breaking bread with the dead helps make us more human and reminds us of the humanity of others.

Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind

By Jacobs, Alan

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NOTE: I received a gratis copy of this volume with no expectation of a positive review.

Perception, Reality, and Failed Epistemology

Someone shared a post on Facebook. It’s one of those half-thoughtful pieces of writing from a website that make its living getting clicks that lead to them betting paid for the ads that dominate every page.

In this case, the article was more substantive than most, because it dealt with the way photos can manipulate public perception. In this case, they show a series of images in the article (it isn’t actually one of those annoying slide shows) of people apparently too close together in a line, except a different angle shows that the people are really about 6 feet apart. Then there are people that are “obviously” sitting closely together, but another photo shows they are actually a reasonable distance apart.

The purpose of the article is to show that images can mislead. And it does demonstrate that photographic evidence can misrepresent the actual circumstances. Good enough, as far as it goes.

However, the title and the first line of the article reveal a radical failure in epistemology (i.e., how we know things) that I believe is too common and is problematic. The fact that the article got through whatever editing process shows that someone actually thinks that reality—not simply our perception of it—is flexible.

Failure in Epistemology

The title of the article is wordy in that attention-grabbing inconclusive way: “Photographer Takes Pics of People in Public From 2 Perspectives and It Shows How Easily the Media can Manipulate Reality.” Unlike many titles it actually communicates the gist of what the post tries to argue. But the assertion that you can actually “manipulate reality” is the problematic phrase.

The article opens, “Everyone knows that reality is subjective. Our perception may change in an instant depending on how much and exactly what we know.”

The second sentence is exactly correct. Our perceptions will change radically depending on the facts that we are given. But “perceptions” in sentence two functions as a synonym for “reality” in sentence one. That is an epistemically horrifying statement, which is reinforced by the miserable generalization in the first line that “Everyone knows that reality is subjective.”

Given that this is a click-baity website post, I’ll forgive the Valley Girl tone of the piece. In fact, I am thankful for this little piece of unsophisticated folk-epistemology, because it reveals what I believe to be a commonly held perspective.

Reality is Fixed, Perception is Subjective

The authors of the article in question understand the rudimentary fact that reality is fixed, even though they state the opposite. “Everyone knows that reality is subjective” makes no sense as a statement in article whose point is that camera angles and lenses can be used to misrepresent true reality. Reality isn’t subjective, it is objective. The camera angles show how the misunderstanding can evolve.

But the subjectivity of reality, as it were, is a basic tenet of contemporary epistemology. It shapes the way many social sciences present their findings. It is the foundation of so many movements that center around identity.

“My perception is reality,” is the battle cry of social media, which has largely shaped our view of the world.

Early in the Corona Virus pandemic a medium sized Twitter-mob was mobilized by a video claiming that a white woman was racist, because she covered her face and moved away from an African-American man (we presume, based on who posted it and claimed to film it) who was filming her and began coughing in her vicinity. His caption stated that she was a racist and provided the video to prove it.

Knowing nothing about the person who took the video or the woman in the video, I have little to go on. She may, in fact, be a KKK member on weekends. But that video provided no evidence of it. In fact, all that is showed was that an exceptionally nasty individual was attempting to ruin someone else’s life by making accusations without evidence.

The video showed someone covering her face and moving away from someone who was coughing. It isn’t clear where or why that would qualify as a racist act in the middle of a pandemic.

At the point when we understood very little of how the virus spreads, it was wise for someone to cover their face and move away from someone coughing, when the subway was mostly empty and there was plenty of room to spread out.

But the “reality” of the Twitter-mob was shaped by their false perception created by the words over the video. She was a racist because (a) she was white, (b) because the videographer said so, and (c) because she moved away from someone when there is significant concern over life-threatening airborne pathogens. That was the scenario that lead to hundreds of people commenting on the video about the bodily harm they would like to inflict on the woman, how much they hate white people, racists, and anyone who might think to disagree.

Many of these people have been conditioned to believe that perception is reality. Thus, when the national news posts a picture of an activist beating a drum in the face of a teenager in a MAGA hat and tells us that the boy is harassing the elderly activist, there are some people that truly believe that, despite other photos, video evidence, eye witness testimony, and personal statements from the activist that contradict that initial reading. Perception is reality, especially if that perception supports my prior assumptions.

Or, consider the nakedly false assertion by Planned Parenthood and its supporters that the Center for Medical Progress’s undercover videos that exposed them selling dismembered parts of babies is deceptively edited. This narrative is conclusively believed because it has been asserted by a favored group (who is deeply invested in arguing that point), despite the posting of the full, unedited videos online for anyone to verify. For many people, perception, especially if it supports the right conclusions, is reality and nothing can shake that.

This is an epistemic nightmare that has been inflicted on society by people seeking to change society—sometimes for the better–– but has come to be adopted by the majority of the culture regardless of party affiliation or place on the political spectrum. Reality is not subjective. Our perception of reality is, though.

The Fruit of Bad Epistemology

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are reaping the fruit of this bad epistemology.

There is legitimate confusion about a new disease, possible preventative measures, potential treatments, etc. The confusion isn’t necessarily the result of a failure on anyone’s part, it is often driven by people drawing early conclusions from insufficient information. Sometimes its just the best guess from what we know. Leaders are trying to make decisions to protect people with very little information, which may (and does) get contradicted by new information that comes weeks or even days later. It’s an unenviable position.

But as confusing information gets promulgated to a population primed to believe that reality is subjective, it is no wonder that different groups choose their preferred understanding of reality. That is exactly what the culture has conditioned people to do.

If feeling oppressed is the essence of oppression, even apart from any evidence of personal or systemic bias, then protest over a feeling of oppression is just as legitimate as anything else. If there is conflicting information or data from different settings that supports a desired action, then we have been told we can believe that absolutely as long as it is the politically preferred version. If labelling someone as racist or pathologically afraid of a sexual minority is enough to make it true, then excluding expert testimony that is based on the best data available is permissible if it comes from someone that can be labelled as part of the non-preferred group.

A large percentage of the major intellectual institutions have invested the past decade trying to convince people that obvious physical observations about sex and gender can be overridden by the approved intelligentsia with questionable pseudoscientific studies. It’s little wonder that now, when it comes to life and death, people have come to accept that epistemology. This time it’s working against many of those who want control and may, in fact, be working against the common interests of our communities.

Society has invested a generation or more in teaching people that reality is subjective. Now that it matters, we’re reaping the fruit of that position. We are due for an epistemological revolution.

Hope for Recovery

The answer is not to revert to the very modern idea that we can absolutely know objective truth.

The closest we can get to absolute truth is divine revelation, which still requires interpretation and systematization. Absolute truth exists and we should pursue it, but we’re not going to get it this side of glory.

One of the failures of modernity was that it presented an epistemology that ignores the position of the observer. There are roots to this perspective in ancient history, but, in part, they took off because of a shift toward placing humanity at the center of all knowledge during the Enlightenment. The Modern folk-epistemology that developed out of that teaches that reality is objective and that we can know it absolutely and objectively.

Post-modernity brought some blessings in that it reminded us that we are subjective people with biases. We stand in a particular place to observe. There is no way for us to totally step outside of our own viewpoint to see things perfectly as they are. This is helpful, because modernity often steamrolls those who view thing outside the accepted perspective.

But many people take that helpful revelation of post-modernity too far and argue that their viewpoint is reality. That is the folk-epistemology evidenced in the BoredPanda article that inspired this post. Thus, the media can “easily” “manipulate reality.” That leads to an even more unlivable society than the strictures of modernity.

We need a more incredulous people who are willing to question their assumptions before grabbing the pitchforks and torches or undermining millenia-old understandings of the world. We also need more honest curators of the news that make a faithful attempt to present reality as it is, rather than trying to score clicks and political points. Until our world has a better epistemology, we are in for perpetual conflict. We may also be in danger of an enduring pandemic because of deeply faulty epistemology.

The Madness of Crowds - A Review

I was on a major university campus recently and was struck first by the affluence that surrounded me. Beyond the significant tuition payments and nice dorm buildings, there were very few “beater” cars on display. Most of the vehicles looked fairly new—something radically different than the way college kids used to drive. The university is huge, so it is really a city within a city, and both of those cities are affluent. There was a rarefied air of wealth and sophistication.

More significantly there were posters, fliers, and bumper stickers that declared opposition to “colonization,” support of various identities, and a host of other positions that reside somewhere on the left-wing of global politics.

To be clear, racism remains a significant issue in our world and must be combated. There are still misogynists and cads who use their power to abuse and undermine women. There are bullies that pick on anyone who doesn’t fit in with certain norms and attempt to demonize them.

At the same time, there are significant points where the movements that are calling for “justice” along different lines of gender, race, and identity seem to make their arguments on indefensible and sometimes self-contradictory grounds. Though they profess to be concerned about others wielding power,they seem to be altogether too prepared to swing their own billy clubs, often figuratively and sometimes literally, in the name of their preferred positions. This extra-judicial enforcement of their ideas and positions seems to undermine the nature of justice as it has been understood in most civilizations of which we have record.

Douglas Murray’s book, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, takes a closer look at the various neo-Marxist movements to examine their foundations and abuses. Murray stands on what would be described the “conservative” side of many of these debates, since he indicates a belief in truth that should be pursued apart from one’s self-interest. At the same time, Murray is himself an openly gay atheist. This means that he certainly does not agree with many social conservatives on issues like the redefinition of marriage, the morality of same-sex erotic relationships, and the existence of God. This makes his critique of the various identity movements intriguing and, perhaps, more powerful.

Summary

As a gay man, Murray begins with a critique of the portion of that portion of the left’s culture war. While he is openly in support of recent inventions like the Obergefell decision that arbitrarily redefined marriage, he is careful to note that within the last decade, there were multiple gay-rights organizations, including the Stonewall organization, that opposed gay marriage. A big portion of his argument here is that, although he thinks the changes are largely good, it might be more reasonable to expect people who hold to millennia-old positions on sexual morality to take a while to come around to an affirmation of a newly invented concept.

In the second content chapter, Murray examines the current presentation of the feminist movement. His point in this chapter is that the movement is largely contradictory and puts everyone in a nearly impossible situation. There are obvious statistically significant differences between men and women in general, but to note those things publicly is, for some, a high crime. Attempts to undermine bias have created processes that necessarily bias organizations and culture in ways that tend to cut the feed from under those they are intended to help. In addition, the identity-oriented science arguments of feminism (e.g., there are no fundamental differences between men and women based on genetics) come into direct opposition with the theories favored by many in the various gay movements (e.g., there are fundamental differences between heterosexuals and homosexuals based on genetics), which creates issues. The issue becomes more epistemological than political at some point.

The third content chapter wrestles with the racial justice movement, which in its best aspects has led to awareness of systemic wrongs and worked to correct them. On the other hand, the same movement has also sought to make race (one of) the most important aspects of a human’s essence and thus made it more possible for systemic bias to continue or grow. In some cases, the result has been a new systemic bias against a different set of minorities, as has been evidenced by Harvard’s discrimination against Asians in admissions. This also puts people in weird spots, so that whites have to self-deprecate to speak against racism or be perceived as colonizers. The struggle in many cases seems to be more about power than truth.

The final content chapter discusses the transgender movement. Murray expresses sympathy with individuals who legitimately struggle with a sense of discomfort with their bodies and believe they would be more satisfied presenting as the opposite sex. At the same time, he notes that the movement for trans-rights has short-circuited the processes that might guard someone from making irreversible, life-altering decisions without considering that there might be another possible cause or solution. He discusses multiple examples where people who express minimal discomfort with their sex are quickly stepped down the road toward chemical and surgical transition, without a thorough vetting. Again, there are epistemological questions about the nature of truth and whether even asking questions (“Is your feeling true and lasting?”) is perceived as harmful.

Between each of these chapters is an interlude that explores some of the underlying causes and further consequences of this rapid epistemological shift. Murray discusses the Marxist foundations of the movement, which serves to continually enhance human discomfort by undermining power structures. He notes the impact of tech, with rapid communication, the inability to have a private conversation, and the work of Google’s search manipulations to present an alternate reality. Finally, he includes a section on one of the worst aspects of these movements, which is that there is no place or possibility of forgiveness. Statements that were uncontroversial a decade ago can now be used to destroy people who are deemed undesirable. Context matters little, as long as the right things are opposed violently and openly.

Analysis and Conclusion

Murray’s book is helpful in many ways. He points to the unsustainability of much of what passes for the social justice movement. The quest for destruction of power necessarily creates an oppressive power that will likely be as bad or worse a master.

The danger of Murray’s book is that his examples of gross abuses of various identity movements to pursue hatred and destruction of the innocent may lead some to believe that we need only resist those movements. That is most likely to occur among those who don’t actually read the book, or do so only cursorily. Murray takes concerns for the persecution of gay and trans individuals seriously, but notes that the movements that claim to support them are destroying the possibility of their being accepted or the society that will be able to accept them. In attempting to shift the Overton window, these groups may rip the house off its foundations, leaving us all cold and miserable in the winter storms.

The value of this book is that it looks beyond the gross abuses of violence and power by the various identity movements to interrogate the intellectual basis and question the logical conclusions. The result is an exposé that is illuminating, even if readers do not agree with all of Murray’s conclusions. There are a few points where Murray seems to drift a bit into outrage porn, but on the whole, he takes a fairly balanced view and calmly makes his arguments. This book, of course, is likely to be panned as violent oppression by many within the various justice movements simply because it questions some of the foundations and outcomes of their movement. However, it would benefit many on the left and the right to read the book and consider their own positions.

The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

By Murray, Douglas

Buy on Amazon

NOTE: I received a gratis copy of this volume with no expectation of a positive review.