
How French “Intellectuals” Ruined the West - andrenth
https://areomagazine.com/2017/03/27/how-french-intellectuals-ruined-the-west-postmodernism-and-its-impact-explained/
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MsMowz
What's most fun about anti-pomo hit pieces like this one is how decidedly
postmodern their polemics are. More frustratingly, there is no unitary
postmodernism, because it was a broad confederated movement, so undoubtedly
there are postmodern thinkers who the author would sympathize with and others
who she would hate.

The author's motivations are revealed in the conclusion:

>Our current crisis is not one of Left versus Right but of consistency,
reason, humility and universal liberalism versus inconsistency, irrationalism,
zealous certainty and tribal authoritarianism. The future of freedom, equality
and justice looks equally bleak whether the postmodern Left or the post-truth
Right wins this current war. Those of us who value liberal democracy and the
fruits of the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution and modernity itself
must provide a better option.

She's upset that classical liberalism has been abandoned on the right and
modernist socialism has been abandoned on the left, and wants to carve out a
return to reason for classical liberals in the center. There are two issues
with this.

The problem with the idea of the right or liberal "left" returning to
classical liberal thought is that the classical liberal thought of the 19th
century was unable to answer questions that came up as capitalism and liberal
society developed. Different answers led to different traditions: modern
liberalism, conservatism, and right-wing libertarianism. You can't just undo
250 years of development and pretend that the world is how it was when Smith
and Locke were writing.

The problem with her idea that the left should return to modernist traditions
(e.g. the social democratic tradition, communism, anarchism, etc.) is that the
left already has. The fastest growing political movement in the United States
(and in most European countries, most notably the UK) is socialism. The group
spearheading this movement in the US is the DSA, whose largest caucus is the
Refoundation Caucus, a Marxist and Leninist (but _not_ Marxist-Leninist)
group. Postmodernism has been essentially been absent from the left since the
1990s, with the only exception being the academic "left."

Regardless, despite its many flaws, we are all better off for postmodernism
happening. The "inconsistency, irrationalism, zealous certainty and tribal
authoritarianism" that the author rails against is exactly what Foucault,
Derrida, et al. were writing against. They revealed grand errors in mainstream
intellectual thought, and that shouldn't be diminished by the fact that their
analyses weren't otherwise very useful.

