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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   2936 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 9, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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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?

Eh, there’s two questions here.

Other commenters, especially @2rafa, have answered one: “how many of you believe in something that owes its existence to postmodern philosophers?” Probably a decent fraction. It’s got to be overrepresented among people who spend their time reading words words words detailed political analysis on the Internet.

But the other question is “how much of woke politics owes its existence to postmodern philosophers?” I think this fraction is overestimated. Most radical leftist politics is materialist: plain old class-interest. That covers the economic arm, (old-school) gender theory, and positions on immigration and justice. The rest tends to derive from extreme versions of liberalism. Drug legalization, LGBT issues, etc. Postmodernism isn’t really needed to justify these, even when it may be applied post hoc.

The biggest exception is race. More pedestrian angles on race relations are relatively played-out. As a result, there are honest-to-God critical theorists trying to mess with curricula. But…that’s kind of all? BLM was class interest. The Case for Reparations, incredibly materialist. How much weight are the postmodernists really carrying?

When people look at and complain about woke influence, they’re not talking about postmodernism. Deconstruction and race-swapping and “subverting expectations” aren’t usually philosophical statements. They are the natural response of a field which fetishizes novelty. The similarity to postmodern philosophy is, most of the time, convergent evolution.

I'm interested in what you believe. I compiled kind of a postmodern quiz from previous conversations in my reply to rafa, so if you please.

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