Violence and Hurling Insults are Intrinsic to Postmodern Philosophy

By Stephen Hicks

April 22, 2019

Are we fighting the postmodernist activists with one hand tied behind our backs?

A standard problem that good people have in fighting bad people is that the bad are willing to use tactics that the good are not willing to use. And good people resist using those tactics because they don’t want to turn into the bad.

In this article I want to focus on two points of strategy: One is that the postmodern activists’ most important asset is one that we give to them for free, and which we should withdraw. The other is that the moral high ground does have short-term costs, but will be much more effective in the long run.

Here is one arena of conflict with the postmodernists: Arguments.

Intellectual battles—they are the cognitive lifeblood of any healthy society.

Intellectual battles—they are the cognitive lifeblood of any healthy society. Life is complicated, the stakes are high, so thoughtful and passionate people are going to have lots of arguments. Because it is only by argument we can sort out the facts about complicated matters. That is exactly what arguments are—structuring all of the data and opinions and seeing what does and does not follow. And it is only by putting our ideas to the test of evidence and by being willing to change our minds that we can make progress.

Often, this is not fun—argumentative discourse can be unpleasant, but even uncivil discourse is far better than settling our differences by physical fighting. The advantage of being an intelligent species, as the Austrian philosopher, Karl Popper, pointed out, is that we can let our theories die in our place. So we put them to the test and let the bad theories die.

But for discourse to be productive, we need principles of civility to guide our investigations and our debates. And especially our leading institutions—schools and those like universities that are supposed to be dedicated to truth-seeking—should make those principles of civility explicit and foundational and instill them in the next generation.

This means we do have a strategy-and-tactics problem, because postmodernists do not play by the same rules the rest of us do. When everything is in the form of subjective narratives, as the postmodernists believe, then subversion goes all the way down, if that fits your subjective preferences.

Our classic rules of civil discourse are as follows: Approach discussions with a spirit of benevolence, give people the initial benefit of the doubt, make one’s goal the mutual advancement of understanding, hear out both or all sides (depending on the case), be civil in criticizing and in receiving criticism, don’t just make stuff up, and hold steadfast that truth matters.

But the postmodernists cast a jaded eye on the “truth.” They see words as mere weapons in a battle between adversarial groups. In that battle, they believe power is the only reality and “truth” (often put in quotation marks) is merely the most persistent or ruthless survivor.

The American postmodern philosopher, Richard Rorty put it this way in a revealing moment: “Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with saying.” Note that getting away with stuff is being legitimized by a famous philosopher.

Rorty’s postmodern fellow-travelers in France—Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and others—work the same broadly deconstructive territory.

This issue is crucial. It’s the difference between two detectives arguing in a forensic lab over the best interpretation of the evidence, assuming their goals are truth and justice, and those lawyers who see the courtroom only as a power struggle in which all that matters is who is best at rhetorical affect on the jury and procedural manipulation of the rules of evidence.

Our code of ethics, by contrast, also includes rules about moral values: Be respectful in an argument of legitimate differences. We should tolerate an expansive range of beliefs and practices, unless physical force is initiated—that’s where we will draw the line. Do not name-call or hurl insults easily. Be admiring of others’ accomplishments. Be proud of one’s own. Admit mistakes, one’s own and of one’s culture, and strive to correct them. We take those as foundational moral principles.

On that latter point about taking responsibility for mistakes: both individual and cultural improvement are trial-and-error processes, and that is to say there will be errors. And while we have made, I think, great progress in battling poverty, slavery, sexism, racism, incivilities, it is absolutely true that our historical record is not perfect. So I believe it is morally appropriate that we have intense debates about, for example, affirmative action and reparations. And we are intensely engaged with these questions: Can we make up for sins of the past? If we are going to try to make up for those sins, how are we going to make good in a way that apportions blame and desert fairly? Those are hard questions, but morally responsible people take their history seriously.

Here again Richard Rorty represents, to my mind, the postmodern side. When he was asked directly about the political Left’s many historical sins, crimes, and outright brutalities—and it is important to notice here that all of the leading postmodernists of the first two generations are of the Left, usually the very Far Left—in response to this question about the Left’s many historical sins, Rorty replied: “I think that a good Left is a party that always thinks about the future and doesn’t care much about our past sins.”

To me, that makes it very unsurprising that younger Leftists have little understanding or care about atrocities in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Cuba, and even the more recent case of Venezuela. Because, again, we have a leading postmodern philosopher legitimizing simply brushing aside an ideology’s past horrors. And that’s a profound irresponsibility.

I am using Rorty as a foil, but it is worth noting that he is a mild postmodernist. He is one who—despite his official stance of getting away with stuff and his calculated forgetfulness—hopes that we can in limited ways still try to be nice to each other.

But leading philosophers pave the way for their contemporaries and followers. And those who in the next generation are not so nice. The nastiest insults fly at the drop of a hat: fascist, racist, toxic sexist pig, and so on.

Those insults are coming these days, not only from the intellectual leadership itself or even the graduated activists, but increasingly from undergraduate students now at scores of universities across the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom—precisely at places where the postmodern ethos (or anti-ethos) has taken place.

I should note parenthetically that there are no snowflakes among the student activists. As young adults, they’ve all watched scary movies, they’ve argued rudely and crudely with their schoolmates, they’ve had their hearts broken, they’ve learned about environmental degradation, the Holocaust, they’ve seen online pornography, and, in most cases, they have lost grandparents and other loved ones. They may be young people, but they’ve not been raised in bubbles. So when those activists are calling for “safe spaces” free from the expression of opinions that might hurt their feelings or from viewpoints that they do not like—something else is afoot. When you find those same student activists hurling macro-insults against perceived micro-aggressions, you know that a rhetorical weapon is being deployed. They have been trained well by their postmodern professors about tactics for shutting down their opponents in the ideological wars. Authentic snowflakes would not use crude language and harsh confrontation.

So how do we deal with vigorous activists who are cynical about truth and civil debate?

That is a big topic. But the first step is to understand what we are up against and where it came from. Bad philosophy got us into this mess, so philosophical self-education is essential. And merely clarifying an adversaries’ fundamental beliefs is all by itself empowering.

On that fundamentality: it is important to recognize that postmodernists are not simply those who believe that knowledge is hard, that truth can be slippery, and goodness is rare. Every intelligent and thoughtful person knows that. So we can and should be having vigorous debates among well-meaning liberals and conservatives, optimists and pessimists, naturalists and religious people, objectivists and subjectivists, and so on, about what the right answers are or what the best answers are.

It [the postmodernists’ interest] is in causing more problems and making things worse.

But postmodernists in both theory and in practice are a more dangerous phenomenon, because they make it clear that they are purely negative, critical, and adversarial. Their interest is not in solving problems and suggesting improvements and trying to figure out by civil discourse how best to approach things, rather, it is in causing more problems and making things worse.

Here is Michel Foucault himself speaking about the nature of his investigations: “These investigations are not intended to ameliorate, alleviate, or make an oppressive system more bearable. They are intended to attack it in places where it is called something else—justice, technique, knowledge, objectivity. Each investigation must therefore be a political act.” (Source: Dider Eribon, Michel Foucault. Harvard University Press, 1991. P. 228)

Notice, “we” [following Foucault] are not at all interested in improving the system, making it bearable, solving the problems, and so on—we are about attacking the system that pretends, in our view, to be about justice, knowledge, and objectivity. We are politicizing everything all the way now. The point is the postmodernists are rejecting everything important about our civilization, root and branch, as oppressive.

And notice the key word from Martin Heidegger, a philosopher of the early part of the 20th century, in whose writings all the major postmodernists are just steeped—Heidegger argued that our entire Western tradition, from the classical Greeks on, must be subject to “Destruktion.” Note also that a generation before Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, another hero to the postmodernists, argued powerfully that Western intellectual and cultural life in its entirety had exhausted itself and that we were into an age of nihilism.

Just pulling the main words from Foucault, Heidegger, and Nietzsche here: oppression—attack—Destruktion—nihilism—this is the core of the postmodern framework.

Their target is “Western” civilization, but since “Western” civilization is increasingly becoming a misnomer as classical and Enlightenment values are spreading around the world, the stakes truly are global.

While the postmodernists are about oppression, attack, destruction, nihilism, they know that we, advocates of civilization, are serious about our ideals of truth and justice, that we take pride in our great-but-imperfect progress. And it is precisely our seriousness and our pride that the postmodernists aim to subvert. They want to replace them with cynicism, with self-doubt, with guilt. And that is precisely why there are relentless charges of racial sin, gender sin, financial sin, the constant charges of privilege and guilt, and the regular accusations of hidden, unsavory motives on our part.

Understanding postmodernism is a start but I do not think that is enough. That is the intellectual job, but we also need action steps: both as intellectuals and activists ourselves, when we are parents, when we are educators, business professionals, and politicians. What can we do about postmodernism to defend and advance genuine civilization?

That is also a hard question, but as a start it is helpful to recognize that a purely negative, purely critical, purely nihilistic philosophy is uncreative. By its nature, it can only be destructive—it cannot itself offer any truth, it can’t offer any goodness, beauty, or creation of value. That means it has to be parasitic on those philosophies that do, in fact, generate positivity in the world.

What that means is that the postmodernists and the postmodern system depend on the system that it is attacking for both for its material resources and its moral status. So the strategic action step is to take away the resources.

Postmodernist Jacques Derrida stated forthrightly in one of his books, Writing and Difference, that postmodernism was giving birth to “the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity.”

An apt response would be to starve the beast.

The most important resources are the ones that are given to the postmodernists by us, and especially our moral sanction. Moral sanction is a powerful psychological force. When we believe in the rightness of our cause, we are empowered—but when we are filled with self-doubt and guilt, we feel the opposite of that: we feel disempowered. At the same time, when we give moral sanction to the postmodernists, when we treat them as misguided idealists serious about problem-solving, then we give them a legitimacy that they in turn use to attack, often viciously, our sense of moral worth. When we are attacked by vicious tactics, it is always tempting to respond in kind. So it is important to recognize where the attacks are coming from and withhold any moral sanction from a purely nihilistic, purely negative philosophy.

The high road that we take does involve costs. Yet it is also important to remember that across the centuries we have advanced civilization against amoral and immoral adversaries precisely by taking the high road. It has been in the hard work that actual human beings put in—that is what created the material prosperity that we all benefit from. From the honest and creative thinking that eliminated crippling diseases and doubled lifespans. In the righteousness of our vigorously attacking slavery—we did not, for example, make slaves of the slaveholders but maintained our moral righteousness. That deep commitment to justice that extended liberties and equalities to men and women of all races and ethnicities—and doing so on the basis of a philosophy that strives for objectivity and often achieves it. We are the force for truth and goodness in the world—that is always the only thing that has worked. That is to say, we have the moral high ground. And we should recognize it and take pride in it.

By contrast, it is precisely the postmodernists who have bought into a philosophy of cynicism. They are the ones who have given into jaded despair, and their attacks are meant to bring us down to their low level.

We need to understand postmodernism, but we should not sanction it. Yet we can only remove our sanction when we know our genuine accomplishments and the ideas, especially the philosophical ideas, which made them possible in the first place. Know your enemy, yes, but first “Know thyself.”

This article is a revised version of what was first published as a podcast and a podcast transcript, under the title “Postmodernism’s Moral Low Ground” on April 11, 2019, at Open College Podcast.

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About the Author: Stephen Hicks

Stephen Hicks is Professor of Philosophy at Rockford University, Illinois, USA, where he also directs the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship. He is the author of two books in intellectual history: Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault and Nietzsche and the Nazis. His other publications include essays and reviews on education, entrepreneurship, and ethics in publications such as Review of Metaphysics, Business Ethics Quarterly, and The Wall Street Journal. He blogs at StephenHicks.org.

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