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I’m having a body snatchers moment, ever since Dase jumped in angry in a ‘da juice’ discussion I was having with SS where I was just pointing out the imho postmodern trappings of his argument. I thought with all the bitching about wokes, the criticism of postmodernism was baked in, but it appears it’s a major fault line on the board. So how many of you are postmodernists?
Wokism is a classic Hegelian grand narrative. So are many forms of fascism, certainly in the more popular German incarnation thereof. The current progressive ideology doesn't descend, whatever MAGA QAnon types declare, from the "Frankfurt School". It descends much more linearly from the longstanding liberal-progressive tradition of grand narratives that brought you such hits as prohibition. It descends almost entirely from gentiles who were the key figures in enlightenment philosophy. Postmodernism was 'invented' by leftists but was widely derided, even initially by Orthodox Marxists as covertly reactionary. This is because postmodernism is a framework by which one could conclude, quite rationally, that the Marxist mission and the Marxist historical narrative (ie. dialectical materialism) were wrong or at least substantially irrelevant and/or not necessary.
All post-modern movements (that is to say, all major political movements that are either not explicitly Hegelian or which do not explicitly involve recreating or extending pre-modern ways of living, like the Amish) are deeply influenced by postmodern thought (including by the Frankfurt school). This includes the 'tradcath revival' that followed Vatican II and filtered into the modern FSSP/SSPX. It includes modern political Islamism as imagined by Bin Laden. It includes weird, esoteric online subculturalist politics. It includes the modern Anglophone 'dissident right'. These aren't entirely postmodern movements by any means, many rely on older ideologies (part of postmodernism is that it allows, unlike modernism/grand narrative room for many smaller premodern narratives, including traditional memes). One can acknowledge this or reject it, but in the end what the postmodernists (or those currently considered academically 'postmodernist') particularly the French like Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Foucault were able to provide was the framework for the cultural criticism of the progressive grand narrative in which the modern internet right engages, in which almost all of us engage. Moldbug and many other reactionaries have acknowledged this over time, as I said last week when we last had this discussion.
Dase's argument in that thread is relatively weak. There are plenty of things to be argued among 'power worshippers'; Western elites, as even Karlin has finally acknowledged, are broadly of a high quality even if they have adopted some low quality memes. Certainly there are very few historical societies people can point to that had universally higher quality elites (as I believe even Signals - or another ethnonationalist regular - noted a few weeks ago, the class of effete, educated, extremely classically well-informed sort of people who ruled Europe before 1914 fucked up big time themselves, in the end, and so many of their sons died for it). American elites rule over Silicon Valley. Even if they did nothing to create it (they did indeed do much, many American elites are Silicon Valley to the core) it is hard to call this incompetence, whatever the state of the homeless in San Francisco. It's also, if anything, something of an ahistorical notion to suggest that early America had particularly high quality elites compared both the present and to many other countries at the time, so I don't think this is merely residual quality now fading. I read an account of the final attempts at reform in China over the last decades of the Qing dynasty and was struck by how absurdly competent certain parts of the court were in that period - they really did try everything they could, but it was too late. Some would argue that the Russians in that post-Japanese war, pre-WW1 period attempted similar.
'Might makes right' is facile but it is also one of the major longstanding narratives in which the right engages, while it can just be discarded or even blatantly ignored when it becomes inconvenient, it is compelling and certain sectors of the dissident right do wash their hands of it a little too much on a case-by-case basis.
Well of course , because it can criticize anything and its conclusions are arbitrary.
I would say Postmodernism is a revolt against enlightenment rationality, not a continuation of it, but the lineage of the idea doesn’t matter to me. Postmodernism is more than a criticism of grand narratives (bailey).
There are important questions that I deny and @FCfromSSC , @DaseindustriesLtd , @SecureSignals, the woke affirm (you probably too). Questions like:
Dase’s bizarre “power worshipper” insult, as far as I can tell, comes from the foucauldian idea that truth is just a mask for power. So he hears power when I speak of Truth.
The postmodernists themselves would say exactly the opposite!
A lot of people will look at Nietzsche for example and say that he was just a romantic poet railing against rationality because he thought it was like, stupid or something. But those people haven't actually read his work; his arguments are far more subtle than that.
Essentially the argument is not that we should reject (an overriding commitment to) rationality as something external to us, but rather that rationality "overcomes itself"; it undermines itself from the inside. In order for the irrationalists to be "wrong" in some objective sense - in order for rationalism and irrationalism to not just be two arbitrary sides of the same coin - then there has to be a sense in which we just "should" believe what is true. We should believe the truth because it's true, and if you knowingly choose to believe something false instead, then you're doing something wrong. In other words, there have to be normative facts about what we should believe - there have to be objective facts about what you should or shouldn't do in a given situation.
But, Nietzsche contends, rationality itself has shown that there are no normative facts! Such facts don't fit in with a scientific, materialist worldview. There is no God to tell us what we should or shouldn't do; God is dead. Just like there are no objective facts about what you should or shouldn't do from a moral perspective, there are also no objective facts about what you should or shouldn't believe either. So a commitment to being rational ends up leading you to the conclusion that there is no reason to commit to being rational, beyond your own arbitrary choice. You can just decide to keep being rational anyway; but then, it's hard to explain how your choice is any better than the postmodernist's commitment to ignoring rationality and simply believing whatever he wants. Obviously, true beliefs are very useful in most situations, but false beliefs can also be useful.
This is a theme that gets repeated throughout the "postmodernist" tradition. Derrida is careful to constantly stress that he's not attacking classical philosophy from the outside; rather his project is to show that a scrupulous commitment to classical norms will ultimately lead to those norms undermining themselves. Whether he succeeds or not is another question. But the concern is there, at any rate.
So, the postmodernists don't think they're rebelling against rationality. They think they're taking rationality to its logical conclusion.
I told you I'm not interested in whether they consider the enlightenment their daddy or not. My problem is the garden-variety claims their otherwise tolerable adherents make in my sub.
You know, I can't take this, I'm going to adopt a tells-it-like-it-is prole persona, and challenge those highfalutin folks to believe poison is actually coke, and then drink it. I'll show them the usefulness of reality.
Sounds like he wasted his life searching for nonsense nobody asked for, and even failed at that.
There’s never been an iron-clad argument against skepticism. Even in ancient Greece you would get people who would sit there and say “nope, nothing’s real, I don’t believe anything, it’s all BS”.
All you can ever do is engage with the arguments someone presents as best you can, or, if you think they’re talking total nonsense, just stop talking to them.
If this was a 'how many dancing angels on a pin' question, I would leave them to their games. But it's burning their epistemology! They think empirical questions are a matter of choice! They are completely incapable of updating on some of the most important questions. Each of them is trapped in their own cell (the woke cell, the anti-jew cell, the anti-elite cell, etc) and despairing. They will only come out to fight each other.
No. I, at least, think you are calling questions empirical when they are not.
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