Postmodernism in the mainstream

The great crisis that the United States is passing through has many different elements.  Politically, for more than three years, an incompetent, almost illiterate demagogue has occupied the White House, showing that he is in every way incompetent to function as President of the United States.  The Republican Party has done nothing about this because he has given it so much of what they wanted. Medically we face the worst epidemic since 1918, and our initial success in cutting down its spread is now threatened in large part because of the President's incompetence.  Economically we have had an economic collapse without parallel in its rapidity, and we really have no idea of how we shall get out of it.  It is an intellectual crisis, however, which I want to talk about today, because I think I provide some understanding of how we got where we are today.

Reading the first fifteen inaugural addresses and 46 state of the union addresses of the Presidents--the source material for the book I am now writing--has brought home to me clearly that the United States was founded as an Enlightenment experiment.  Our founders were not starry-eyed idealists.  They had grappled first hand with the most serious political issues, they had fought a revolution that was in part a civil war, and they had watched the British constitution--which they had valued as the most enlightened government on earth--try to impose tyranny upon themselves.  They had also read histories of ancient Greece and Rome and knew how early republics had become tyrannies. Attempting to establish a government based upon complete political equality among the citizenry--an entirely new experiment in the western world at that time--they spoke frequently of the dangers of the abuse of power.  They also understood that only an educated citizenry that was alive to the dangers of too much passion in politics could make the new nation work.  

This heritage is threatened now on both sides of the political spectrum.  Nearly 20 years ago, a high official of the George W. Bush Administration--generally thought to have been Karl Rove--placed that administration in opposition to what he called the "reality-based community." "We're an empire now," he said, "and we create our own reality."  Now our president recreates reality to satisfy his own unconscious several times a day, and his whole staff and an entire television network bow, scrape, salute, and go forth to preach the new gospel.  Yet things are not that much better on the other side of the political fence.  I want to illustrate this by discussing two letters that were published this past week. Then I want to draw on my own experience as an academic to try to explain where new views, increasingly in the ascendant, originated.

The first letter, signed by about 150 journalists, academics, and artists, was published early last week on the web site of Harper's magazine. While applauding recent protests for racial and social justice, they reject "a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity." They specifically cite a number of specific newsworthy incidents without mentioning any names. "Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes." "This stifling atmosphere," they continue, "will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes."  The signatories include some of the best-known names in journalism, the arts, and literature, including Margaret Atwood, David Brooks, Noam Chomsky, Francis Fukuyama, Linda Greenhouse, Randall Kennedy, Mark Lilla, Winton Marsalis, George Packer, Orlando Patterson, J. K. Rowling, Salman Rushdie, Gloria Steinem, Gary Wills, and Fareed Zakaria.  The list, as you can see, is very diverse with respect to both race and gender.   On the other hand, although I do not have the time to look everyone up, the list does not, sadly, seem to be very diverse with respect to age.  The vast majority of signatories come from the Silent and Boom generations.

Before turning to the reply, I want to talk about the developments in academia over the last forty years or so that lie behind it.  

During the 1980s, new views of reality, language, and the nature of intellectual life became popular.  Their most important exponent was probably the French historian Michel Foucault, and they rapidly came to dominate both gender studies and racial and ethnic studies.  They held, to begin with, that language was the ultimate reality and the medium through which politics took place.  It always seemed to me quite understandable that that principle became popular in academia, because it does quite accurately describe academic reality, though not reality out in the real world.  At any given moment in disciplines like history and literary criticism, certain ideas and approaches are particularly popular, and careers are indeed made, and occasionally broken, by choices to go with the flow.  The exponents of the most popular ideas hold academic power.  What academics often forget, however, is that the citizenry at large often knows little and cares even less about their intellectual flavor of the month, because they live in their own world.

The second key aspect of postmodernism was the identification of power--expressed through language--with particular demographic groups.  This was not new.  Marxists had long argued, with some justice, that economically dominant classes more easily got their messages across than poorer ones.  The new categories, however, turned on gender and race, not wealth.  Straight white males, the new orthodoxy came to argue, had dominated intellectual discourse--and had used this dominance to advance their own interests at others' expense.  Meanwhile, the voices of women, nonwhites, gays, and (later) transgender folk had been "marginalized".  It is very clear, I think, why this world view became so popular among academics who were not straight white males--to the point where very few straight white males dared to speak out against it or to put forward any alternative views of what history or literary criticism should be.  For many (though never all) female or nonwhite academics, the new orthodoxy not only defined the problem, but prescribed the cure: to hire them, allowing them to correct a centuries-old power imbalance by "giving voices" to their own groups.  Their perspective deserved more space because it had had so little in the past--and no straight white male had the right to question it, since to do so would simply try to maintain the previous power balance.  And every perspective was equally valid, regardless of the relative numbers of people belonging to a particular demographic.  

Being myself a straight white male who has spent his life writing (mostly, although not exclusively) about the doings of other straight white males, I have to take a moment now to put forth an alternative view.  My books were never about unified attempts of straight white males to dominate women or other racial groups (although imperialism played an important role in some of them.)  They were about arguments, struggles, and wars among different white males, who often had very different views of what the world should look like and what appropriate decisions in certain situations might be.  That dynamic, it seems to me, has shaped far more of the history of the western world than conflicts between demographics.  That view is now directly threatened, however, especially with respect to the history of the United States.  The New York Times's 1619 Project, which I wrote about at length in an earlier post, argued that slavery and the oppression of black people was "central" to the American experiment from the beginning.  Now slavery was already central to society in the southern colonies, but it certainly was not central to the issues that led the colonies to fight a war for independence. In addition, as I pointed out just last week, the founders made sure that it was not central to the new Constitution, by refusing even to mention it explicitly or to give it any permanent legal sanction.  It is time now, however, to return to the issue at hand.

A reply to the Harper's letter, also signed by about 150 people, appears to have been published yesterday.  The signatories include many academics, writers, and journalists, who are much less well known.  That is, in a sense their point. Their argument is a perfect representation of the ideology that I described in the last three paragraphs.

"The signatories," they write, "many of them white, wealthy, and endowed with massive platforms, argue that they are afraid of being silenced, that so-called cancel culture is out of control, and that they fear for their jobs and free exchange of ideas, even as they speak from one of the most prestigious magazines in the country."  This sentence, I must remark, exemplifies another aspect of postmodernist scholarship that I have encountered many times: when you check their footnotes, the original source doesn't say what they claim it does.  The original letter never says that its signatories fear being silenced themselves or losing their own jobs.  It pleads the case of much younger people who have lsot their jobs and advocates freedom of expression in principle.  The response, however, in good post-modernist fashion, has to deny that any such thing as the advocacy of free expression in principle even exists.  In its view, no one ever advocates for speech except on behalf of their own demographic or class.

The next paragraph is equally revealing:

"The letter was spearheaded by Thomas Chatterton Williams, a Black writer who believes 'that racism at once persists and is also capable of being transcended—especially at the interpersonal level.' Since the letter was published, some commentators have used Williams’s presence and the presence of other non-white writers to argue that the letter presents a selection of diverse voices. But they miss the point: the irony of the piece is that nowhere in it do the signatories mention how marginalized voices have been silenced for generations in journalism, academia, and publishing."

The quote from Thomas Chatterton Williams is designed to discredit him.  Any good postmodernist now thinks that racism is systemic, structural, and bound up with white and black identities to an extent that none of us can possibly escape.  The last sentence is key: because, in their view, "marginalized voices" have been silenced for generations--a statement which would have surprised a long list of black and female writers going back for over a century that I could make--no one else can be allowed to complain about infringements upon other speech untl the balance has been redressed. How many years, decades or centuries that will take, they do not say.  I am struck, by the way, by the letter's failure in this paragraph to refer at all to marginalization based on gender.  This reflects the current moment. The controversy over the death of George Floyd has definitely put gender equality on the back burner.  

Continuing, the reply argues that the original letter is really concerned about something else entirely. In truth, Black, brown, and LGBTQ+ people — particularly Black and trans people — can now critique elites publicly and hold them accountable socially; this seems to be the letter’s greatest concern. What’s perhaps even more grating to many of the signatories is that a critique of their long held views is persuasive."  This, of course, is projection:  obseesed themselves with racial and gender identities (although not, once again, with simple femaleness), they assume that the men and women who signed the letter--despite their racial diversity--are simply standing their own obsessions on their head.  They aren't.

Then comes the other key postmodernist word:

"The content of the letter also does not deal with the problem of power: who has it and who does not. Harper’s is a prestigious institution, backed by money and influence. Harper’s has decided to bestow its platform not to marginalized people but to people who already have large followings and plenty of opportunities to make their views heard. Ironically, these influential people then use that platform to complain that they’re being silenced. [To repeat: no, they didn't.] Many of the signatories have coworkers in their own newsrooms who are deeply concerned with the letter, some who feel comfortable speaking out and others who do not."

One more paragraph makes clear exactly what is at issue.

"The letter reads as a caustic reaction to a diversifying industry — one that’s starting to challenge institutional norms that have protected bigotry. The writers of the letter use seductive but nebulous concepts and coded language to obscure the actual meaning behind their words, in what seems like an attempt to control and derail the ongoing debate about who gets to have a platform. They are afforded the type of cultural capital from social media that institutions like Harper’s have traditionally conferred to mostly white, cisgender people. Their words reflect a stubbornness to let go of the elitism that still pervades the media industry, an unwillingness to dismantle systems that keep people like them in and the rest of us out."

The idea of integration by race and gender originally was to open up various fields of endeavor to more candidates to let them show the world what they could do and secure appropriate reward for their talents.  Today, however, the signatories of the reply letter would denounce what I have just said as pure straight white male elitism, designed to keep the values of people who look like me in power.  Not only do we have an obligation to give women, racial minorities, and different gender identities more positions--straight white males have no right to question anything that they may say, or how they choose to say it, or even to say anything themselves that nonwhitemales find hurtful.  A New York Times editor, as the original letter pointed out, had to resign because he approved an op-ed by a US Senator that black staffers said made them feel unsafe.

The reply then runs down and identifies the six examples to which the original letter referred.  With respect to one of them--a professor fired from a research firm because he tweeted a summary of an academic paper arguing that violent protests did not, historically, advance racial justice--they agree tht such a firing would be "indefensible" but claim that it was "anomalous."  With respect to Tom Cotton's op-ed in the Times, they argue that he has enough of a platform already to justify the Times leaving him out--a principle that could have application indeed.  In the other cases, they argue either that members of dominant groups got away with something members of marginalized groups could not, or that they deserved what they got.  They then attack various specific signatories of the letter on specific grounds, and claim that all the signatories have "reinforced the actions and beliefs of its most prominent signatories, some of whom have gone out of their way to harass trans writers or pedantically criticize Black writers."

"The intellectual freedom of cis white intellectuals has never been under threat en masse," they conclude, "especially when compared to how writers from marginalized groups have been treated for generations. In fact, they have never faced serious consequences — only momentary discomfort."  Thus, they end by not only marginalizing, but erasing, the large numbers of black and female signatories of the original letter--but also by reaffirming, once again, the critical principle of postmodernism. Individual liberty, the foundation of our institutions--and a concept freely open to all--is meaningless to postmodernism. We are all defined by race, gender, and sexuality, and we cannot escape.  We were--in effect--born without freedom of thought.

These ideas have been mainstream on college campuses for decades, and lie behind the many controversies that have roiled campuses in recent years.  It occurs to me, indeed, that it's probably fortunate for higher education that the current eruption of protest took place when campuses were all closed, since it would have renewed attacks on all sorts of traditional targets.  Now, they apparently dominate the thinking of many of the younger people not only in academia, but in journalism and the arts.  I thank the signatories of the original letter for protesting, and I am glad that I still feel the freedom to do the same.