"The Scream" (Edvard Munch) 



In the struggle that I am waging with postmodernism, I am definitely David and it is Goliath. For now, anyway. I am one of a very few voices that cry out against the whole postmodernist way of thinking. As I have said here many times, I think postmodernism is flawed in its core. 

Languages are made of cultural conventions, sets of sounds then written characters, that a group of people set up among themselves so that humans of the same language group can get along and work together as a community. Cultural conventions they are, but completely arbitrary and particular to a particular culture in each case they are not. 

There is implicit in any communication that connects one mind to another, and passes information across the gap between minds, some common referent that the words and sentences refer to and that both parties to the communication at least roughly understand. Otherwise, communication could not take place. To posit otherwise, is simply incoherent. The assumption that postmodernism is based on - namely, that everything humans do is irretrievably locked inside of the doers' implicit set of cultural assumptions - contradicts the deeper axiom that makes human social living possible in the first place. That axiom, if articulated, would say something like: "You have these needs that are grounded in the material world, and I have something to tell you about them via these bits of language that we both understand. The bits of language get the meaning that they have for us both, and can then be passed back and forth between us, because of the material world that we both experience." The culturally neutral material world is assumed to exist and assumed to be at least somewhat describable with our words. Otherwise, our babel would be made up of 7.4 billion mutually untranslatable tongues and our lives would be poor, solitary, nasty, brutish, and short. 

Translation, as a human activity that we do as we re-word a message from one language into another language, shows this truth up even more dramatically. Translation would not be possible if there were no outside, material world to which people from two different language groups can refer, as their translators attempt to make one tribe's meaning clear to another tribe.

The whole postmodernist project has kind intentions ("Don't belittle another culture by comparing it to your own! Don't even let your mind go there!"), but it is so glaringly self-contradictory that I have to wonder what could have led thinking people to such a muddle in the first place.

And yes, I have a theory that explains why postmodernism ever gained the force it did.  

I think the originators intentions were basically very kind, even though the system of thought that they proposed is incoherent. But I also think there were deeper things going on in the minds of the originators of this philosophy, things that drove this rationalizing. 

I don't need to mention the names of the most prominent postmodernist thinkers. Suffice it to say that most of them are gone. But I will try to find in their life histories, some experiences that I believe profoundly shaped their thinking, along with the thinking of millions they influenced.  

To explain my thoughts on why postmodernism ever got the momentum that it did, I need to briefly describe the work of Leon Feistinger and his student, Elliot Aronson. These two men were social psychologists whose most important research and writing was  centered around cognitive dissonance theory. Wikipedia gives Feistinger's definition of cognitive dissonance: 


cognitive dissonance is the mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time; performs an action that is contradictory to one or more beliefs, ideas, or values; or is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas, or values.


In short, cognitive dissonance is the mental clashing we feel when we see ourselves as hypocrites. We don't much care for that feeling so, to reduce it, we adjust our beliefs or our actions to bring the two into consonance, or at least a more tolerable level of dissonance. We need to like ourselves. 

Probably, if you're a sharp reader, you can tell where this train of thought is going. 


   

                                                                  "Guernica" (Pablo Picasso) 




The postmoderns, it seems clear to me, were decent people who found the chaos of nineteenth century philosophy - Kierkegaard and Nietzsche - distressing enough. But then came the horrors of two world wars, and for the Americans, Vietnam. Some of the postmoderns even played roles that we now think of as collaborating with the tyrants. These were tyrants whose henchmen did murder and torture on an industrialized, assembly line scale, though in fairness to some of the philosophers and social scientists who cooperated with the tyrants, most of the atrocities were not revealed until after the various wars were well under way or over with.

In their secret hearts, these men then asked themselves ruthlessly: 

"How could I have stood by and let this happen?" Or even, "How could I have believed the monstrous lies these people told?"

Cognitive dissonance. 

It's interesting, in a side note, to see how the tone and attitude of Americans as shown in their movies changed as a result of the Vietnam War. "Judgement At Nuremberg", a huge production released in 1961, unequivocally condemns the educated, professional people of Germany for what happened under the Nazis. Educated people, the film says bluntly, should have known better. But by one decade later, the film "Cabaret" leaves audiences with the clear conclusion that Germany was like much of the world in those Depression times. Ordinary people trying their best to live ordinary lives - loving, bickering, working, and so on. The forces that led to the rise of the Nazis were too huge and complex for any one person or even group of people to do much about. Or so "Cabaret" seems to say. 

Such were the experiences of the postmoderns. Read their life stories. In France, Germany, Britain, the US and all of the countries thereto attached, they knew horrors, sometimes ones that at the time were kept out of the public eye, but also sometimes ones they witnessed and even participated in. Some of them even backed the tyrants.  

The postmoderns then, to reduce cognitive dissonance, made up a philosophy under which no one is responsible for anything in order to be able to live with what they saw their countrymen do, and in some cases, with mistakes they made themselves. 

Unfortunately, these kindhearted forgiving motives have, in my view, gone too far. 

Yes, guys, you made some bad mistakes. I see that and I see that to do otherwise would have required an almost super-human insight and prescience. And I can forgive you. All you need to do is allocute and then ask for forgiveness. We all screw up sometimes. 

But no, that does not mean that these acts weren't mistakes. Nor does it mean we can disavow responsibility for our actions and our lives now. Most of all, what we cannot do is settle into a kind of disillusioned resignation. What we must do is find a better model of human culture and of what makes wars happen so that we can keep from doing it all again. 

So before I close, let me make one thing clear. I have not developed and offered a philosophy that connects our mental lives, and especially our moral values, to empirical reality mainly because I want to help my fellow human beings get out of this postmodernist muddle. That would be a gratifying consequence if it ever came about. But I did the thinking and writing I did first and foremost because I really do believe that the model of human social evolution that I have developed explains what has been going on with our species all along. I seek first to explain reality. 

In reality, I claim, values foster patterns of behavior and behavior patterns either help us or hinder us in our struggle to survive. 

The postmodernists' kindhearted intentions are not enough. Not for me, nor for my species. We must above all else, deal first with what is. Know the truth and it will set us free. Then maybe, we can give it to the world, and then maybe, together, we can build a better version of that world. One in which there really is a life of decency and sense for all. 

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless friends, have a good day.