Spirit of the Times - part II of series

“Modernism” is the label we stick on the cultural and intellectual genie which was released by industrialisation from the middle of the 19^th Century - although purists insist that “modernity” is actually the world for the philosophical aspects. In many ways “The Manifesto of the Communist Party” (1848) marks the start of what was to be a very turbulent century 

The cultural aspects are superbly described in Peter Gay’s Modernism – the lure of heresy (2007) which has a stunning 32 page bibliographical essay. The intellectual/political aspects of modernism probably require both The Crisis of Reason – European thought 1848-1914 by JM Burrows (2001) and Contesting Democracy – political ideas in the 20^th Century by Jan Werner-Mueller (2011) 

There is some dispute about when Modernism eventually gave way to Post-modernism - with Perry Anderson’s The Origins of Postmodernity (1999) doing the most thorough detective work. This timeline tracks down a reference by C Wright Mills in 1958 – but most people now accept that Daniel Bell’s use of the phrase “post-industrial” in 1960 signalled the birth-pangs of post-modernism with The Temporary Society by Warren Bennis and Philip Slater (1968); The Age of Discontinuity by Peter Drucker 1969 and Between Two Ages - America’s Role in the Technetronic Era by Zbigniev Brzezinski (1970) best capturing the transition pains…

I’ve made a couple of efforts to make sense of Post-Modernism – with my last attempt selecting what I considered to be the more accessible of what is a very turgid field of study.  This was probably the best summary I came across. 

I’m encouraged to return to the fray by a book which came out recently with the title Cynical Critical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody (2020) by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay  

This looks to help those of us who are puzzled by the way that both hard left and hard right seem engaged in a new Culture War – with the clear progress which has been made toward racial and gender equality not apparently being enough to satisfy significant numbers who are taking to the streets and toppling statues…..Is this just impatience – or is there more to it than that. Pluckrose and Lindsay think the latter. Here’s how the they start - 

A fundamental change in human thought took place in the 1960s. This change is associated with several French Theorists who, while not quite household names, float at the edges of the popular imagination, among them Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard. Taking a radically new conception of the world and our relationship to it, it revolutionized social philosophy and perhaps social everything. 

Over the decades, it has dramatically altered not only what and how we think  but also how we think about thinking. Esoteric, academic, and seemingly removed from the realities of daily existence, this revolution has nevertheless had profound implications for how we interact with the world and with one another. At its heart is a radical worldview that came to be known as “postmodernism.” 

Ultimately, the Enlightenment that postmodernists rejected is defined by a belief in objective knowledge, universal truth, science (or evidence more broadly) as a method for obtaining objective knowledge, the power of reason, the ability to communicate straightforwardly via language, a universal human nature, and individualism. They also rejected the belief that the West has experienced significant progress due to the Enlightenment and will continue to do so if it upholds these values 

When I’m being flippant, I refer to Postmodernism as the “whatever” school – since its proponents use that phrase and a shrug of their shoulders to express their contempt for the poor souls who still believe in objectivity or searching for “truth”.

Personally I have a lot of time for people who insist on looking at the world with multi-angled prisms – I posted once about 57 varieties of capitalism. But that doesn’t make me a relativist! I respect the process of trying to disprove falsities… 

And, in all the discussion, I can’t understand why no one refers to the classic book on this subject which was long before any French deconstructionists got involved in the fight – The Social Construction of Reality by T Luckman and Peter Berger (1966)