A_GMASON

Postmodernism, and its favorite process called “deconstruction,” runs rife throughout contemporary culture, but much more visibly in academia. It is the major impetus for the nihilistic atmosphere in contemporary culture. These are the people working the “unholy alliance” with jihadists against America.

Nothing provides a taste for something like a living, breathing example. A history student at UCLA provided an arch-typical example in Front Page Magazine, 17 February 2005. Describing his history professor, Mary Corey, the student said, in part:

What I found in Corey, however, was a woman completely untouched by objectivity, or the desire to achieve it. In her first lecture, she said, “If you think I’m going to be neutral, I’m not going to be.” And in keeping with her testimony, Corey spent the next ten weeks giving a socialist rendition of history, with no regard for the many other sides of the account.

Her bottom-line version of recent American history was some cocktail of male hegemony, racism, class systems, and the vast right-wing Republican conspiracy. Early in the quarter, she went on a rant against capitalism and the market system, which she defined as “the weird faith that everything will work out fine.” “Capitalism isn’t a lie on purpose. It’s just a lie,” she lectured us, “It’s easy for us to look back and say these people [who believe in markets] (sic) are dorks.” And for the climax, “[Capitalists] (sic) are swine…They’re bastard people.”

The elements of postmodernism can be found in this student’s account, if you know what to look for.

Were this some obscure academic’s discontents, we might disregard the student’s account. However, this professor is not alone, and she “teaches” our young. People of her philosophy dominate America’s universities and colleges, both on the faculty and in the administrations. Tenure protects these soul-destroying “teachers.” The recent kerfuffle about the University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill exposed another glaring example. From these postmodernism-stuffed teachers, destructive thinking infects every discipline in our universities and colleges, including the “teachers colleges.” From there, the toxicity percolates through the elementary and high schools.

Their influence extends deep into contemporary culture. For example, have you wondered about questions like these?

After reading Dr. Hicks’ book twice—and both readings were utterly fascinating—I found answers to some and the route to answers for the rest. Cultural corruption became more understandable than it ever had been to me. Few books create intellectual excitement, but this one does. Its contributions are so important that I have added it to two others to complete a triad of highly recommended books for those who want to understand the toxicity of contemporary culture and what to do about it. The other two books are: (1) Leonard Peikoff’s, Ominous Parallels and (2) David Horowitz’s, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, books reviewed on this site. Two of these writers are professional philosophers, and the other is a professional writer who abandoned his Leftism decades ago to expose it.

To understand postmodernism, it is necessary to do as Dr. Hicks does, begin with the philosophical revolution which caused postmodernism. Happily, Dr. Hicks makes the central philosophical ideas of very difficult-to-understand philosophers easy to follow. Readers should consult his book for details.

The history of the West is the history of the status of reason. [Reason is the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by the senses, using processes of inductive and deductive logic.]

If you think philosophy is dull, impractical, and irrelevant, Dr. Hicks will disabuse you of these notions. You cannot digest this book and not open your eyes to a crystal clear view of much of current culture; you cannot still think that philosophy (or ideas, if you will) is not personally relevant to you and the lives of everyone you know.

Dr. Hicks begins with the Enlightenment which spanned most of the 17^th century and all of the 18^th century and gave birth to the Industrial Revolution, capitalism, science and technology, and America, the monument to Enlightenment ideas. The Enlightenment raised reason to cultural dominance, a prominence not seen since Aristotle. As reason spread, faith receded in cultural influence and importance. The Enlightenment had been ignited by the Renaissance, which had been ignited by the rediscovery of the works of Aristotle, which unleashed reason into Western civilization. Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and John Locke (1632-1704) were among the most powerful of a large number of Enlightenment intellectuals.

The advocates of reason found themselves unable to think their way out of philosophical criticisms of their opposing and seemingly irreconcilable positions: (1) Knowledge from external sense data only (empiricists) versus (2) knowledge from only the internal mind (rationalism). Anti-reason forces began interpreting this apparent breech as representing chinks in the armor of the defenders of reason, and providing an opportunity to re-enthrone Faith (acceptance of a belief in the absence of evidence or proof). The opportunity took form within Europe in the latter half of the 18^th century and became known as the Counter-Enlightenment movement.

In France, Jean Jacques Rousseau attacked reason, civilization, rights, and freedom. He hated the Industrial Revolution and capitalism, and his writings inspired the worst phase of the French Revolution (the third, “guillotine” phase, 1793-4), it should be noted. Rousseau, reminiscent of Islam, advocated putting non-conformers to faith and the state to death. Rousseau’s notions of freedom and living the proper life pre-date the amusing anti-concepts of Orwell’s 1984, and it could have been Rousseau who inspired the inscription over the Auschwitz gate, Arbeit Macht Frei [Work makes you free], although almost any German philosopher could also be credited.

Rousseau strongly inspired the single most important philosophical figure of the 18^th, 19^th, and 20^th centuries, Immanuel Kant. Except for Rousseau, the Counter-Enlightenment came solely from German philosophy of the latter 18^th century and all of the 19^th century. Kant’s role cannot be overstated. His philosophy lives today in the hand-me-down philosophies of the 20^th century to the present, including postmodernism. Note, however, that contemporary philosophers cannot think their way out of Kant and his descendants. That fact exposes a huge chink, and a very real one, in their intellectual armor and augurs well for the future.

Both Rousseau and Kant wanted to destroy reason in order to make room for feelings; Kant specifically wanted to restore faith (an emotional belief in a God, for which there is no evidence). Kant launched a completely irrational set of ideas which he cleverly clothed with the appearance of rationality. German intellectuals, who had never been warm to Enlightenment ideas, bought Kant hook, line, and sinker. Kant gratified their deepest anti-Enlightenment feelings and wishes.

Kant stated (but never proved) that one cannot know real reality through reason. Reality, he said, can be known only highly indirectly by faith. Reason can know only the world it creates in the human mind. In short, reason, or mind, subjectively creates the phenomena that we seem to be aware of, but this is not reality, according to Kant. Our minds make it all up, whole cloth. Truth becomes what we agree to as being “true” (collective subjectivism)—you have heard it often in the form of something like, “20 million Frenchmen cannot be wrong.” In short, what we “know,” is not real; what is “real,” we cannot know. Kant destroyed reason to make room for emotions, whims, desires, wishes, and, of course, faith. He did this because he wanted to believe. From Kant to the present, this primacy of emotions dominates philosophy. Kant came along at just the right time to provide just the rationale the anti-Enlightenment intellectuals needed; he gave them a weapon as well as an excuse. Since no one on the other, pro-reason side fought back, in time the anti-reason crowd won out among intellectuals.

Kant begat Hegel, who got rid of reason to make room for a universe made up of contradictions, all in conflict, all striving to achieve oneness with God (the Absolute); Hegel and Kant begat Marx. Schopenhauer enshrined a basal emotion he called "Will," "...a deeply irrational and conflictual Will, striving always and blindly toward nothing" (Hicks page 54, 55). Nietzsche enshrined power over men. They changed thinking in the intellectuals who, in turn, changed the thinking of their populations. Thus, they paved the way for Communism, Nazism, and all forms of socialism in the 20^th century. Just as Islam makes Muslims want Islam and jihad, these Counter-Enlightenment philosophers made people want Hitler, Stalin, and collectivism. These same ideas gave birth to postmodernism many decades later, which explains why the thinking of so many of today’s intellectuals so closely resembles that of Islam, Hitler, and Stalin.

This toxic German philosophy began trickling into America starting as early as 1810. By mid-century, young adults journeyed from America to Germany for intellectual and cultural “finishing” (pun intended). They returned stuffed with Counter-Enlightenment philosophy. In America as in Europe, there was no organized pro-reason philosophy to counter these toxic ideas. The influence of Enlightenment ideas had been incorporated into the powerful dynamism of the Industrial Revolution in America; as it gathered steam, its progress slowed the growth of the influence of German philosophy until the end of the 19^th century. By then, and subsequently, German philosophy had gathered enough influence to dominate American philosophy. For example, the American philosophy known as “Pragmatism” is fundamentally rehashed Kant and Hegel. It died as a philosophical movement in the 20^th century, but it survives in almost “pure culture” in today’s politicians.

The Counter-Enlightenment philosophical fundamentals had a political-social-economic child born of them, named “socialism.” All Counter-Enlightenment thinking extolled some form of the “group” or “social aggregate” (the collective) in preference to the individual. Kant extolled the human specie over the human being himself. Hegel enshrined the State. Marx enshrined the Masses. Herder enshrined the Volk, while others enshrined religion. In all cases in their thinking, the collective was always more important than the individual. The role of the individual was reversed from that of the autonomous man in Enlightenment thinking to becoming a servant of the group, or state, or whatever social aggregate of whatever sort. All Counter-Enlightenment thinking fully accepted the only ethics which could make socialism possible, namely altruism—the self-sacrifice of the individual in service to the collective. “Altruism” came from a socialist 19^th century philosopher, Auguste Comte.

Kant’s intellectual offspring marched through the 19^th century and deep into the 20^th century. Like evil “Johnny Appleseeds,” they sowed destructive seeds of a metaphysics that replaced reality with an unknowable, preposterously imaginary “unreality,” which could be changed at will by the consciousnesses of people. It replaced the objectivity of reason, which deals with matters of knowledge, with completely subjective, arbitrary, intuition which has no relationship with reality. Knowledge, they believed, cannot exist. Wishes and whim took the place of what reality is. In place of rights and rational individualism, they extolled either religious or secular versions of anti-individualism and self-sacrificial service to the collective. All of them united in hatred of capitalism. They all wanted socialism instead. Socialism was, and still is, their ideal.

When you rid yourself of reality and reason, you soon run out of the ability to think, as well as anything to think about seriously. That happened to academic philosophy in the first 50 years of the 20^th century. It trivialized itself. It got rid of the kind of thinking that began with philosophy in Ancient Greece. As a result, nihilism took over—the hatred of values and those who hold values, and the wish for “everything to become nothing.” Germany stepped up to the plate once more to provide the perfect philosopher: Martin Heidegger. It is hard to understand how such absurdity could actually become a philosophy that was taken seriously, but Heidegger found the way, and he set the stage for postmodernism. His audiences wanted to believe him.

What finally tipped intellectuals over into postmodernism was the crisis of socialism. Despite every prediction from Marx and similarly minded anti-capitalists, capitalism thrived, and more and more people, from the highest to the lowest socio-economic levels, benefited. Capitalism (“a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned,” courtesy Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal) and individual freedom went hand-in-hand. Their successes utterly frustrated and befuddled the intellectuals. One of their last great hopes for the realization of socialism was the Great Depression of the 1930s. Capitalism did not die; it came back better than ever. Then National Socialism (Nazism) also totally failed, as did all other forms of fascism (fascism is a variety of socialism). By the end of World War II, the U.S.S.R. was a social and economic basket case, and even the “red lovers” could not escape that truth. At no time did the intellectuals ever question their own premises about socialism. They wanted it, and that was enough. When Stalin’s atrocities became public in the late 1950s, the Soviet Union died as an intellectual ideal, some 30 years before it died existentially. It was unavoidable fact: Socialism had failed everywhere it had been tried, without exception. The closest they ever came to explaining the failure of socialism, and you hear this even today, is that socialism had never been properly implemented; it was the fault of the “socialists,” not socialism.

Did the intellectuals abandon socialism as their ideal? Hardly. They continued to worship it as postmodernists. They did something inconceivable to rational men. Since their original philosophy had failed to support socialism, they changed their philosophy so that the new one would support socialism (“Postmodernism is a result of using skeptical epistemology to justify the personal leap of faith necessary to continue believing in socialism,” Hicks, page 181). You have to be totally divorced from reality and have no respect for reason to be so shamelessly arbitrary. It is like watching the Super Bowl and changing the rules after the game has ended so that your team wins instead of losing.

Why would they do such a thing? Oswald Spengler, a darling of the 20^th century collectivists, nailed it: “Socialism means power, power, and more power.” (Hicks, p 128; emphasis mine)

The leading philosophers of the postmodernism movement should be mentioned for completeness. Three are French (Michel Foucault; Jacques Derrida; and Jean Francois Lyotard), and the other is American (Richard Rorty). Dr. Hicks provides particulars, if anyone wants to know more about them.

Understanding any intellectual movement requires a specific type of analysis, and postmodernism is no different. Dr. Hicks first provides the following preamble:

Any intellectual movement is defined by its fundamental philosophical premises. These premises state what it takes to be real, what it is to be human, what is valuable, and how knowledge is acquired. That is, any intellectual movement has a metaphysics, a conception of human nature and values, and an epistemology. (Hicks, pages 5,6)

· Metaphysics: Postmodernism is anti-realist, meaning no one can speak meaningfully about an independently existing reality. Postmodernism substitutes language for reality (“social-linguistic constructions”).

· Epistemology: Postmodernism states that reason or “any other method” cannot acquire objective knowledge of reality. Subjective creations of consciousness must become accepted by others as knowledge.

· Human Nature: Postmodernism claims that individual identities come from “social-linguistic” groups, varying according to the influences of sex, race, ethnicity, etc.

· Ethics and Politics: Postmodernism holds that all of society is a seething cauldron of groups in conflict. Postmodern ethics and politics require identification with and sympathy for these groups, which are perceived to be oppressed in the conflicts. Because of all of the conflict, the only solution is the use of physical force by these oppressed groups: homosexuals, women, blacks, those of other races, non-white males, Muslims, American Indians, liberals, the aged, children, the “poor,” etc.

All of postmodernism amounts to nothing but elaborations of arbitrariness, driven by feelings. It contrasts with “modernism,” by which Dr. Hicks means reality, reason, human autonomy, individualism, and “liberal capitalism.” These are the values of the Enlightenment and “neo-Enlightenment.” Unfortunately, elements of these ideas exist largely in fragmented form today.

With postmodernism, language does not connect with reality. Language is entirely a subjective tool, used to accomplish specific goals. “… [T]o most postmodernists, language is primarily a weapon.” (Hicks, page 178, emphasis mine).

Postmodernists are not original. The irrational seldom are. Postmodernists are rewarmed Sophists from Ancient Greece of 2400 years ago: “… [W]ill and desire rule [over reason], society is a battle of competing wills, words are merely tools in the power struggle for dominance, and all is fair in love and war.” (Hicks, pages 182, 183).

“Postmodernism is … first a political movement.” (Hicks, page 186) At root, it carries the spirit and influence of Marxism. “ … [E]verything is relative … nothing can be known … everything is chaos.” (Hicks, page 189) “ … [U]ltimately nothing matters.” (192) “Nihilism is close to the surface in the postmodern intellectual movement in a historically unprecedented way.” (192) Hatred for America and Americans unites postmodernists with jihadists, locking them together by their desire to destroy the West, America, and capitalism. Every time we see news reports of anarchists (WTO, Seattle, 1999; Inauguration, 2005, and many, many other examples) destroying, attacking, and burning down research laboratories (E.L.F.), we see postmodernism in action. To see who these are, consult David Horowitz’s new website, DiscoverTheNetwork (http://www.discoverthenetwork.com/).

Postmodernists revere Nietzsche, who wrote the soul and emotions of the postmodernist. The Left feel weak compared to the capitalists, a combination of self-loathing and envy, which leads to their need to lash out destructively. However, since they are weak, they mostly use words as weapons. (Emphasis mine) Hatred and nihilism define their chronic state. “Everything is … shit.” (Hicks, page 1970).

Postmodernists use “deconstruction” as their favorite buzz-word. “Deconstruction has the effect of leveling all meaning and value …” and “I cannot be special unless I destroy your achievement first.” (Hicks, page 199). Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello used words as weapons to destroy the relationship between Othello and Desdemona. Postmodernism invented political correctness and multiculturalism, two of its most successful tools against their morally uncertain opposition. When you hear radio talk show hosts say that the only news “good” to the Left is that which is bad for the rest of us, you are hearing the truth about postmodernist nihilism. Says Dr. Hicks (page 200):

The art of today, whether in painting or the other formal esthetic disciplines, or throughout the entire entertainment industry of music and movies, has become a paean to postmodernism. Rap music and movies devoid of plot but full of gratuitous violence and impulsivity reflect the influence of postmodernism. None of us can afford to take postmodernism lightly.

My complaints with this marvelous book by Dr. Hicks are few. I wish he had been much more liberal with definitions. He assumes common knowledge about terms whose definitions are unknown or unclear to most people, such as “reason,” or terms commonly used so loosely in the culture that one wonders exactly which of several possibilities the author meant, such as “liberalism” and “collectivism of the right” versus the left. Some undefined terms tax the reader here and there when trying to figure out which meanings lead the author to some conclusions.

Another complaint is how the book ends. Dr. Hicks would have made his points clearer by citing myriad cultural examples to illustrate the tenets of postmodernism. And, after what seemed like a perfunctory two paragraph summary conclusion, he abruptly ends the book, which left me wondering where the rest of the book may be obtained.

Finally, Dr. Hicks incompletely addresses the future of contemporary philosophy and the neo-Enlightenment ideas which serve as postmodernism’s antidote. He is currently writing about postmodernism and the arts; perhaps these and future works will take Explaining Postmodernism the full distance. He is a talented thinker and writer, and is well worth reading.

Explaining Postmodernism either answers, or makes it possible to answer, these and many others. Certainly this reviewer looks forward to taking on some of these contemporary “conundrums,” now better armed by Dr. Hicks’ book.

We have a long way to go to return reason to its proper role in human lives. Such ideas take time to percolate into a culture and to effect change. At least we have a full, reality-based, pro-reason, pro-individualism and rights, and pro-capitalism philosophy to use (Objectivism) and philosophers trained in it taking positions in universities. This philosophy answers Kant, et al, resoundingly.

We must not flag, however, in our own efforts right here and now while waiting for new ideas to take hold throughout the culture. We can use our own individual reason today and tomorrow to fully to set examples and to effect change.

One of the easiest ways for us to be effective is to begin the purge of the institutions of higher education and the teachers colleges of the postmodernists. As alumni, we can exercise enormous influence over an alma mater. Look what alumni and donors did to Hamilton College which wanted to host Ward Churchill. Those successful enough to be big donors can do even more. We can terminate the tenure process so that professors must demonstrate positive reasons for them to retain their positions. We can also influence what we and our corporations donate to and endow. It is horrifying to see lists of duped big donors supporting foundations like the Ford Foundation, which exist solely to fund postmodernists, other nihilists, and keep the tenured soul-destroyers funded as well as in business in universities. These awful foundations also keep Leftist activist groups funded.

Great efforts are afoot to right the ship of America, and these efforts are meeting with success. The toxic Left are howling in pain and fright. They do not like the sunshine exposing them. They do not like the blogs, websites, and other modern media exposures, including talk radio, that they are getting. Their rage belies deep fear and insecurity. Their time is over. They are out of gas, out of ideas, and now out of time. They are running. Let’s keep them running—until they are all gone.

[1] From the book cover: Stephen Hicks is Professor of Philosophy at Rockford College, Illinois. A native of Toronto, Canada, he received his Ph.D. from Indiana University. He is co-editor of Readings for Logical Analysis (W. W. Norton & Co.) and has published widely in academic journals and other publications such as The Wall Street Journal and The Baltimore Sun.