If Leftists could see the obvious consequences of their own positions, they wouldn’t be Leftists. We know this. But since it’s their world, and we have to live in it as best we can, it helps to go back and spell out those obvious consequences from time to time. The biggest, most obvious one of all is what I’m going to call The Great Contradiction. It’s the obvious next step from the Great Inversion: If “whatever is, is wrong”; then all authority, everywhere, is illegitimate — which includes the authority proclaiming The Great Inversion.
We could also call it “the PoMo’s Dilemma”, since this stuff originated in the ivory tower back in the Sixties, and finally broke containment in the late Seventies. Most intellectual fads quickly become caricatures of themselves, but in their haste to get to the next hot new thing the PoMos decided to cut to the chase. Postmodernism started as a self-parody. Put simply but not at all unfairly, PoMo is the assertion for a fact that there is no such thing as a fact. There is no Truth, just “truth”. No eternal verities, just perspective, just discourse; it’s all — say it with me now — “just a social construction”.
I suppose we must give the early PoMos credit for having — in a thoroughly Postmodern way – the courage of their convictions. When Alan Sokal invited the PoMos to try transgressing the Law of Gravity from his twenty-first floor apartment window, the goofs from Social Text published a “rebuttal” to Sokal, informing him, a working physicist, that they, the English Department, understood physics better than he did. He meant it as a joke, but he was really right all along about the so-called “law” of “gravity”.
That was 1996. At that point, any sane society would’ve had the editors of Social Text dragged out of the faculty lounge and shot in the middle of the quad, pour encourager les autres. But of course we chose not to. And why would we? Being close to three decades deep into the Great Inversion by then, we got much barmier stuff than anything Social Text published in freshman orientation. Stick it to The Man, we were told, and don’t trust anyone over thirty …
Severian, “Hoist on Their Own Petard”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-04-19.
February 3, 2024
QotD: The Postmodernist’s Dilemma
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