No, We Are Not Postmodern

The notion that we live in a postmodern world is bandied about, still. Primarily, I come across it among conservatives, political and theological, who tend to mean something about our culture not caring about truth or believing that truth is relative.

Perhaps there are some circles where the concept of postmodernism is applicable. Perhaps it is even clear what postmodernism is. I doubt it holds of American culture broadly. If it does hold, it holds more among conservatives themselves than liberals.

First of all, my argument is not that we actually tend to attain truth, nor that we actually act like we care about truth, but that we would claim to care about truth and claim to aim at it. Further, there are some postmodernist claims which we completely disavow. Yet there is continuity with postmodernism. We used to be more postmodern, but things have changed. It was a phase of which we retain a residue.

The very use of the terms "Post-Truth" and "Fake News" expose, not a lack of concern with truth, but a massive concern with truth, a weaponized concern with truth. Truth cannot be relative in the stereotypical postmodern sense without making these terms incoherent. These terms do not claim that the other side's news is true for them but not for the speaker, rather, it claims that the other side's news is false and usually suggests that the news is maliciously false (whether by intending to be false or maliciously being unconcerned with whether or not it is true). What we do not do, however, is claim that this is good or right.

The use of the term "Fake News" is also incompatible with a radical postmodern take on interpretation which would hold that there are no facts, only infinitely questionable interpretations. We do not claim that the news we call fake is merely an interpretation which is equally possible if one approaches with particular presuppositions; rather, we claim that they are accounts of matters of fact which get things wrong. We object, not only to what we take to be false factual claims, but to what we take to be unjustified interpretations. The postmodern instinct, on the other hand, is suspicious of claims about facts, being extremely aware of how statistics can lie, likely to a fault.

The belief that there is a "right side of history" or that America or a particular ideology is destined for greatness collides head on with the postmodern suspicion of metanarratives. Metanarratives being just such claims about history having a purpose, an overarching structure which gives historical action meaning and our actions meaning in historical perspective.

This shift has come about gradually, and there is important continuity with postmodernism here. We are strongly aware of the sociology of knowledge, that is, how our social groups set up plausibility structures and provide claims as to what can count as knowledge. This underlies the concern with bubbles and echo chambers. We are also aware of a need to listen to and understand those who disagree with us, which at least points in the direction of needing to be aware of each others' presuppositions in order to understand and communicate with each other across ideological lines.

The shift we have undergone is one which moves us from an individualistic way of securing certainty and tolerance by blocking argument to a communal way of doing so. Instead of individually trying to hold off arguments by denying that truths of certain kinds can reasonably be argued for, we form cultures which deny the possibility of any sane argument for certain claims, and regard all arguments for such claims as insane in some form, often maliciously so. Instead of individually demanding tolerance for our views, we merely isolate ourselves to groups of people who do tolerate our views and keep at arms length those who do not tolerate our views.

This shift has occurred because we want our truth claims to be recognized--again, the sociology of knowledge ideas which postmodern theorists largely popularized. In order to gain recognition for our truths, we need groups which will recognize those truths as truths. But we have also retained the desire to avoid needing to argue carefully for our views in response to all-comers. We are uncomfortable with argument, perhaps largely because one of the things we have retained from the postmodern era is a suspicion of reason. The only way to gain recognition for truth claims and avoid argument (and thus gain something have the form of certainty but lacking its power) is to form echo chambers. The two desires of our era are, then, the recognition of our own truth claims and the avoidance of conflict. In some ways, the latter is an extreme manifestation of the former--conflict occurs where truth claims are not recognized. To sum it up in a single desire: we desire certainty. This, too, is opposed to what "postmodernism" is ordinarily used to mean. A true postmodernism is comfortable with uncertainty, indeed, would hold it to be our necessary condition.

This era, too, will give way. We all recognize that echo chambers are a problem and that we have produced a situation where ideologies routinely talk past each other. The challenge is to alter our desires and forms of life in such a way as to move beyond our current era. We must move beyond, rather than back to the "good old" days of modernism, because we cannot unlearn the ways in which our rationality is affected by more than reason, the ways that reason can be used to manipulate, and the ways in which we are situated in cultures.

In pursuing these desires, however, we have cut ourselves off from the genuine community which comes only where conflict can occur and from the pursuit of objective truth, that is, truth which can be recognized by any who genuinely and carefully seek it. We fail, then, to achieve recognition for our claims to objective truth, because our claims are recognized merely as a truth of the community we are in, not as objective truth, that is, the truth of, in principle, everyone. Hegel would claim, I think, that this kind of recognition occurs in the state, and this would account for the way in which the legal system is weaponized by all sides against their opponents in arguments about what is good.

At some point, I hope, we will recognize that we have merely substituted one kind of conflict for another. In seeking recognition for our claims to possess objective truth, we have attempted to wrest it unilaterally from each other by force of law, thus pressing us into a conflict which must end in either annihilation or subjugation of the other view. We are engaging, in other words, in something very similar to a community-level or thought-level occurrence of Hegel's master-slave dialectic. We are operating at a different level, but the same dynamics of conflict are at work, and both ordinary conclusions will be unsatisfactory because they will not prove the truth claims to be objective.

This post has gone long enough. I will end by summarizing. We are not postmodern, but are distinctly not postmodern. Nevertheless, we possess an inheritance from postmodernism which affects how we live, and casts light on our present predicament. When seen in this light, we can see that our present predicament, too, must pass on into a further stage of culture, and cannot retreat to an apparently better age.