I have long been appreciative of the moral and intellectual
excellence demonstrated in the talk and writing by two conservatives,
Stephen R. Hicks and Jordan Peterson. So below I write up their their
8/17/2017 YouTube Video entitled, Jordan Peterson and Stephen Hicks
Discuss Postmodernism. My account starts about 3 minutes into the
over one-hour interview of Hicks by Peterson. I wrote it out with
light editing for coherency. Here is the interview:
Jordan (J after this): “Why is Hick’s book relevant? Because our
culture finds itself currently embroiled in a war of ideas, and those
ideas must be understood.”
My response: Hick’s book was an essential alarm call for American
traditionalists to wake up, know what the enemies of America—the
cultural Marxists-- think, and what their justifications, schemes and
solutions are, so that we make counter them effectively, restore and
make better The American Way, the center of human exceptionalism.
Goodness, high civilization and moral progress cannot unfold unless
the perennial, ongoing clash, a cultural and sometimes civil war
being waged in all societies, all the time, between the children of
light fighting the children of darkness, unless the children of light
prevail, and Hicks provides them with a clear, timely picture as to
what they are up against.
Much of the cultural war and its future will be played out and
resolved along lines which grow out of this war of ideas between
promoters of modernism versus postmodernism. Jordan read HIck’s
book on postmodernism, and it open his eyes, and we should all read
this fine book and exposure of postmodernist thinking and that
threat. Hick’s book discussed in the interview is from 2004,
Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to
Foucalit.
We are so fortunate that Hicks warned the world about this coming
assault on Western values and its way of life, so we have had time to
counter its poisonous influence.
Stephen (S after this): “By the time I got to the end of the 90s, I
realized there was something significant coming out of continental
philosophy (Postmodernism, Ed adds for clarification of the reader.).
And that’s where the book (published in 2004) came out of.”
My response: I have watched this video several times, and I seek to
capture garner Hick’s expertise as to what constitutes the
epistemology of postmodernism, as how to be able to argue against it.
It occurred to me that the sharp, original-thinking, articulate
Hicks, an Objectivist professor—Objectivist thinkers have been long
ignored and marginalized by more conventional philosophers—has
received a boost into fame and recognition in the public arena, and
it could be that the more famous, known Peterson, by associating with
Hicks, made Hicks and his views better and more widely known and
accepted.
J: “When you say significant, what do you mean? What do you mean by
that? Do you mean intellectually? Do you mean socially? Politically?
There's lots of different variants of significiant.”
S: “Yeah, at that point, ‘intellectually.’ This was still the
1990s so postmodernism was not yet (outside of, say, art) a cultural
force, but it was strongly an intellectual force in that, at that
point, young Ph. D.s, coming out of sociology, literary criticism,
some sub-disciplines of the law (if you’re getting a Ph. D. in the
law), historiography, and so on. And certainly in departments in
philosophy still dominated by continental philosophy: almost all of
them are primarily being schooled in what we now call postmodern
thinkers, so the leading gurus are people like Derrida, Lyotard from
whom we get the label, postmodern condition. Foucalt and the others.”
My response: By the 90s the mass movement of cultural Marxism was
just ramping up, and after 2010 it damn near swamped the West, and
yet might if its adherents get their way.
S: “Foucalt and the others.”
J: “So maybe you could walk us through what you learned because
people are unfamiliar. I mean you were advanced in your education
including in philosophy and still recognized your ignorance say with
regards to postmodernism thinking, so that obviously is a condition
that is shared by a large number of people.
Postmodernism is one of those words like existentialism that covers
an awful lot of territory, and so maybe we could zero in on exactly
what that means, and who these thinkers were: Derrida, Foucalt and
Lyotard, and what you learned about them.”
S: “Fair enough. Well, all of the thinkers you just named: they
think broadly, they think strategically and they do have a very
strong historical perspective on their disciplines. And at the same
time they are trying to assess where they can culturally,
politically, socially—and all of them are making a very dramatic
claim: that to some extent, that in some way, Modernism has either
ended or it has reached its nadir, or all of the pathological and
negative traits within the modern world are reaching a culmination in
their generation, so it’s time for us to bother recognize that
modernism has come to an end, and that we need some sort of new
intellectual framework, a postmodern type framework.”
J: “And the modernism that they’re criticizing, how would you
characterize that? That’s Enlightenment values? Scientific
rationalism? How would you characterize it exactly?”
S: “All of those would be elements of it. But so then of course
there are some discipline-specific differences. So literature people
and philosophy people and historians will use modernism slightly
differently.
But the idea at core is that if you look at the pre-modern
world—essentially the world of the Middle Ages, say—that that was
itself broken up by a series of revolutions: the Renaissance,
Reformation, Counter-Reformation, early scientific revolution—and
all of this is going on in historically short chunks of time--1500s,
1600s. And so if you look at both the intellectual world and the
social world, comparing say the 1400s with the 1700s, culturally and
intellectually, you’re in a different universe at that point.
So the features of the modern world—now I’m going to use my
philosophical labels here—are that we are now naturalistic in our
thinking. We are no longer primarily supernaturalistic in our
thinking. So we might be open to the idea that there’s a God or
some sort of supernatural dimension, the way the Deists are, but
first and foremost we’re taking the natural world as a more-or-less
self-contained, self-governing world that operates according to cause
and effect.
And we’re going to study its terms. We’re not seeing the natural
world as derivative of a ‘higher world' or that everything that
happens in the natural world is part of ‘God’s plan,’”
My response: Hicks the Randian and atheist overstates the range,
depth and extent of the power of pure naturalist, atheistic flavor
which ran through the thinking of the Modernists, though it may have
predominated. The people were still quite religious and still are.
S: “where we read omens and so forth into everything. So
metaphysically there’s been a revolution; we’re naturalistic.
Epistemologically, in terms of knowledge, there’s also been a
revolution. How do we know the important truths? How do we acquire
the beliefs that we’re fundamentally going to commit our lives to?
Well, by the time we become moderns, we take experience seriously,
personal experience. We do that more rigorously and we’re
developing the scientific method (the way it organizes the data).
We’re taking logic and all the sophisticated tools of rationality
and developing those increasingly.
And suppose our opposition the is: Either you know something because
you can experience it and verify it by yourself, or we’ve done the
really hard work of scientific method, and as a result of what comes
out of that, that’s what we call knowledge, or our best
approximation to that. And that’s also revolutionary. Just let me
say the prior intellectual framework was much more intellectually
authoritarian in its framework.
You would accept in the Catholic tradition the authority of the
Church. And who are you to question the Church? And who are you to
mouth empirical-rational arguments against the Church? Or you take
the Authority of Scripture, or you accept on faith, that you’ve had
a mystical revelation of some sort. So in all these cases you have
non-rational epistemology that are dominating intellectual discourse.
That is all by and large swept away in the modern world.”
My response: I am a person of deep faith, but I readily admit we want
no elites to have a monopoly of controlled speech and thought, be it
an ecclesiastical, governmental or university elite shutting down
debate.
J: “Okay, so prior to the emergence of the modern world, we’ll
say people are dominated essentially by their willingness to adhere
to a shared tradition, and that shared tradition is somewhat
tyrannically enforced. But there’s no real alternative in terms of
epistemology, epistemology in terms of what distinguishes justified
belief from opinion, let’s say.
And then as the modern world emerges, people discover the
technologies of science and the value of rigorously applied method,
and the comparison of shared experiences and that makes us
technologically powerful in a new way and philosophically from where
we were before.”
S: “Yes, the shared tradition phrase that you added there, that’s
an important one. So I’d say in the early modern world there’s
not necessarily a skepticism about shared traditions—so there would
be an acceptance of shared tradition. But the idea is that you would
not uncritically accept your tradition, You may accept your
tradition, but only after you’ve thought it through and made your
own independent judgment.”
My response: I accept that shared tradition in the Medieval period in
Europe was accepted by nearly all and tyrannically enforced. I agree
to that the epistemology of faith predominant in the premodern period
did lend itself to enforcing opinion which was not as intellectually
rigorous as modernist justified true belief. I also maintain that
scientism, much new knowledge and marvelous, modern technologies
should make us epistemologically optimistic about human access to
objective reality and near certain truth, though some important,
epistemological puzzles remain unsolved, and likely always will be in
doubt.
I wholeheartedly endorse Stephen’s admonishment that shared
tradition or society’s metanarratives can be adopted and favored,
but that no critical thinking, honest adult should ever sign onto any
tradition or reform, before carefully thinking it through, and
judging its merits and deficiencies, independently.
J: “Okay, okay, so you’re elevated to the status of someone whose
capable of taking a stance with regards to tradition, and assessing
its presuppositions and so forth.”
My response: Yes, the core principle of Western thought is the
free-willing, free-thinking, free-speaking, free-acting sovereign
individual who is able to use his powers of reason to assess any
stance on anything, that he has the capacity, the natural right and
the obligation to think for himself, without social, employer or
governmental censure for so doing.
S: “Absolutely.”
J: “So there’s an elevation of the individual and the critical
intellect with the, of the scientific method. Okay, so we might note
perhaps, that that’s a tremendously effective transformation,”
My response: With the coming of the Renaissance, The Reformation, The
Counter-Reformation and Age of Enlightenment, in the early modern
epoch, what emerges and is elevated is this core concept of the
sovereign individual with her critical intellect, a real advancement
in civilization, as it started to become accepted and rather popular
to assume the masses were smart, original thinkers, who could and
should think for themselves.
J: “although maybe it leads in a somewhat nihilistic direction
metaphysically—we can leave that to the side. But it’s a very,
very successful revolution because by the time, at least the
beginning of the 20th century comes along there’s this
staggering—and of course, before that, the Industrial Revolution,
there’s this staggering transformation of that technology and
technological and conceptual power and then a stunning increase in
the standard of living.
And that’s starts in about 1890 to really move exponentially in the
1890s, or at least to get to the really steep part of the exponential
curve. Okay, so that seems to be going well. So, what is it that the
postmodernists are objecting to, precisely?”
S: “Just those two issues: (1) the metaphysical naturalism, and the
(2) the elevation of kind of a critical empiricism and a belief that
we can, through science, even not necessarily a science, but social
scientists and so on, that we can come to understand powerful,
general principles about humanity and social systems.
These two revolutions both are then subjected to counter-attacks. And
again what happens in this case is there is a revolution. Probably by
the time we get to 1800—the height of the Enlightenment—there are
the beginnings of more powerful skeptical traditions that come to be
developed, so thinkers are starting to things like: well, if the
scientific method at root is based on evidence of the senses—we
observe the natural world—that’s our first point of contact. And
then on the basis of that we form abstractions into propositions and
put them in networks we call theories, and so on.
So we start to critically examine each of the elements of the
scientific method, and over time, weaknesses in the existing accounts
of how all of these rational operations ‘work’ come to be teased
out, and philosophy then starts to go down a more skeptical path. For
example, you take perceptions as fundamental—it’s, you know, the
individual subject’s first point of contact with the natural world.
Then you immediately have to deal with issues of perceptual
illusions, or the possibility that people will have hallucinations,
or that the way that you report your perceptual experience is at odds
with how I report my perceptual experience.”
J: “Tell me if I’ve got this right. So with the dawning of the
‘Empirical Age’ let’s say, there’s this idea that you can
derive valid information from sense data—empirically if you
contrast that sense data rigorously with that of others—okay? So
that’s sort of the foundation of the scientific method in some
sense. But then—I think this is with Immanuel Kant—there’s an
objection to that, which is that, well, you can’t make the
proposition that that the sense data enters you cognitive apparatus,
your apparatus of understanding, without a priori structures, and it
seems that is where the postmodernists really go after the
modernists.
It’s that given that you have to have a very complex perceptual
structure (that modern people might say was instantiated as a
consequence of biological evolution), you can’t make the case that
what you’re perceiving is something like ‘pure information.’
It’s always subject to some very difficult delimit (Subjective, Ed
says.) degree to ‘interpretation.
And then you also have to take into account the fact of that a priori
structure and what it might mean for your concept of objective
reality. And that’s Kant, I think, if I’ve got that right.”
S: “Right, well the postmodernists will use both of those
strategies: (1) the anti-empiricist strategy, and (2) the
anti-rational strategy. And what’s important about Kant is that
Kant is integrating both of these ‘anti’ strategies. So in the
generations before Kant the skeptical arguments about perception
which were directed against the empiricists, the empiricists want to
say everything is based on observational data, but then if you don’t
have good answers about hallucinations and relativity and illusions
and so forth then it seems like your intellectual structure, whatever
it seems to be, if it’s based on probabilistic or possible fault
perceptual data, then the whole thing is a tottering mess.
And by the time we get to Kant the Empiricist tradition is largely
unable to respond to those kinds of objections. And so Kant is
recognizing and saying: All right, we’ve been trying now for a
couple of centuries, we haven’t been able to do so—we’re not
going to be able to do so.
Now you nicely emphasized that one of the other responses had been on
the Rationalist side, which is to say, ‘Well, no, you don’t start
with pure empirical data. Instead we do have perhaps some innate a
priori structures built into the human mind—how they got there,
maybe they’re put there by God, maybe they’re put their
naturalistically or whatever—but what enables us to have legitimate
knowledge is that our empirical data comes in and it is filtered and
structured by these pre-existing, cognitive structures as well.
Now the problem with that side of the line—and this is also
well-worked out by the time you get to the Kantians is to say: ‘Well,
if you’re starting with built-in cognitive structures and
everything that comes in, so to speak, goes through this structuring
machine and you’re aware of the output—because that’s what is
presented to your mind—well, how do you know those built-in
structures have anything to do with the way reality actually is out
there? It seems that what you are stuck with is the end result of a
subjective processing and there is no way for you, so to speak, to
‘jump outside your head’ to compare the end result with the way
the world actually is, independently of how your mind has structured
the awareness. So once again you are struck in a rather subjective
place. And again, the importance of Kant here is then he’s also
looking at this more Rationalist tradition, and he’s saying, Well,
look again, we’ve been trying for a couple of centuries to work
these things out, and Rationalism has also reached a dead end.
So we’re not going to be able to do so. So Kant is, in effect,
standing at the end of these two traditions and saying, ‘You know,
the skeptics have it right on both sides: both the Empiricist and
Rationalist traditions fail. There is no way for us to objectively
come to know an external reality. We’re stuck in some deep form of
subjectivism.”
J: “Okay, so I don’t know now whether to talk a little bit about
the American Pragmatic approach to that or whether to maybe we should
go ahead and continue our discussion of the postmodernists because
they’re developing these claims.”
S: “Absolutely. And some of the postmodernists do describe
themselves as Neo-Pragmatists; like Richard Rorty, for example. So,
yes, that’s exactly a direction that’s worth going.”
J: “Okay, okay, so my understanding of that, if I was going to
defend the modernist tradition, let’s say, I would say that we have
instantiated within us an a priori perceptual structure that’s a
consequence of millions, billions of years for that matter, of
biological evolution. And it has emerged in tandem with continual
correction of its presuppositions by the selection process.
But it’s still subject to error because we have a very limited
viewpoint as specific individuals, and not only are we limited, but
we also make, as you might say, moral errors, and, and I’ll get
back to that, that doubt of our own judgment. And so, in an attempt
to ‘expand our purview’ and rectify those errors, we do two
things: (1) We test our hypotheses practically against the world,
which is to say, we say, ‘Here’s a theory of reality,’ We act
it out, we get what we want, and then that’s sufficient proof.
It’s not absolute for the validity of the theory. Proof, but it it
is sufficient proof. And then the other thing we do, and I think this
has been paid attention to much less except by thinkers such as
Piaget, is that (2) We further constrain our presuppositions about
reality with the necessity of constructing theories that are
acceptable to people around us. So they have to be integrate-able
within the currently existing social contract., and they have to be
fundamentally appropriate to the external world. And that’s a nice
set of constraints and it seems to me that that, at least, in some
part goes a long way to answering objections to the limits of the
scientific method that has been discussed ad which you just
summarized.”
S: “All right, I’m sympathetic to much of what you just went
through. In fact, I have a five-point response to the kinds of
argument that have been laid out, where you’re actually putting me
in the position then of defending the postmodern tradition about how
it would undercut each of of those components.
So if you take for example evolutionary epistemology (epistemology:
investigation into the origin, nature, methods and limits of human
knowledge), and you gave a nice sketch of one standard
epistemological frame in which you say: Maybe we have a priori
structures.”
My response: My epistemology is blended, more Randian than Kantian,
but it seems to me that we do have a priori structures including
properties like a personal conscience, our souls, our basically evil
human nature, our selflessness and our innate low self-esteem, etc.
S: “But we can rely on them because we are standing at the long end
of hundreds of thousands or millions of years of evolution and they
would not have survived or enabled us to survive had they not served
some sort of reliable cognitive role in accurately representing the
way the world works.”
My response: I find appealing the idea that evolutionarily, we
thought and tried new ways to be fit and survive and then that those
adaptations were genetically encoded in our DNA, internalized
biologically as genetic adaptations carried down to the present day.
S: “This is actually too early for the postmodernists, though
postmoderns would, although postmoderns would agree with this. This
is to say all of that kind of begs the question in a very deep way
against the kind of skeptical objections that we’re making. Because
in order to make that paragraph-long description of what evolutionary
epistemology is, what I have to take for granted basic assumptions,
certain truths about the world that, for example, there is an
external world, that we are biological creatures, that we have
built-in structures; that these structures are evolutionarily
responsive and conditioned by changing forces and so forth.
And if you take those assumptions to be true, then as a consequence
or as a conclusion, you can infer therefore the intellectual products
which come out of our cognitive processes are reliable. But where did
you get those four premises from? How do you know there is an
external world? How do you know we are biological creatures? How do
you know that evolution is true with all the historical knowledge
that’s necessary to reach the conclusion that evolution is true?
All that presupposes that we have legitimate cognitive methods to
come to understand the world”
My response: As an epistemological moderate, I am a realist and
direct realist, presupposing we can gain probably certain knowledge
about external reality, the existents inhabiting it, their traits,
and how humans interact with reality and its diverse existents. I do
not assume that I know it all or can know it all, but I know enough
to live and make ethical judgments about the world, God, others and
myself, judgements to act upon. I am a residual skeptic, that the
postmodernists have a point to make, to keep us epistemically honest
and humble, but too much acceptance of their believing in nothing,
their noncognitivism, their irrationality, their nihilism, all of
that is stupid and immoral, and not to be engaged, let alone adopted
by the rational indvidualist.
S: “That is exactly what we are arguing about in the first place,
and you can’t just assume that for the sake of coming up with some
premises that are then in turn going to validate those cognitive
processes. So, something like that they will say is a big circle or a
circular-reasoning problem that evolutionary epistemology finds
itself trapped in.
Now I think there are some responses to that, and this is just the
first ‘back and forth’ on that particular debate. But that is the
kind of response that would be there. So the third and fourth
response if I’m keeping track accurately—is to say we also have
constraints with respect to ourselves: that if we have a certain set
of hypotheses or a certain set of theories and we’re testing them
out, we will accept those that give us ‘what we want,’ what I
want so to speak.
And I’m also necessarily in a social situation so what I need to do
is check my results against the results of others.: peer review,
experiment replication and so forth.”
J: “Yes, the ability to live in the same household.”
S: “Yes, absolutely, right. More prosaically, ‘sharing our work
with others.’ Right, so on and so if, so to speak, and this is the
more Pragmatist orientation—if then say we have a theory or set of
principles or guidelines or whatever, and do enable me successfully
to navigate the world to get what I want, or they do enable me to
navigate my social world to get us what we want—then they’re
reliable, true or some sort of success label epistemologically, that
we’re going to give them.”
J: “Okay, so let me ask you a question about that. This is a place
where I get augured in very badly with Sam Harris, when we’re
discussing metaphysical presumptions. So you know and I’m confused
about this. I would say to some degree conceptually because I’m a
scientist and certainly operate most of the time under the
presupposition of an ‘independent’, objective world. But the I
also have some difficulty with the idea that it’s objective truth
within which all other truths are ‘nested.’”
My response: As a moderate realist, I accept that objective truth
exists, is conceivable and effable, that it is the truth within which
all other truths are nested.
J: “And that is something that Sam and the people that he
represents in some sense are very dead set on insisting. Now it seems
to me though that the crux of the matter is something like ‘the
method of proof.’ And that strikes me as very important because,
‘My theory is correct enough if when I implement it, I get what I
want.” is not the same as the claim, ‘My theory is true because
it’s in accordance with some independently existing eternal world.”
My response: The first pragmatic truth arrived at is relatively
certainly true, but the 2nd claim rises to the level of
pure certainty or highly probable certainty because it is objective
and realistic.
J: “I mean both of those things could exist at the same time but I
think the more appropriate claim to make with regards to human
knowledge is something like its ‘biological fundamentality,’
which is that your knowledge is of sufficient accuracy (which is
about the best you can hope for because of your fundamental
ignorance) if when you implement it, it reliably produces the results
which are commensurate, say, with your continued existence.
Now it seems to me that that’s a reasonable claim from a Darwinian
perspective. (Charles Darwin, 1809-1882) And it also seems to me that
it’s very much in keeping with the claims of the American
Pragmatists. And I mean it’s not like they were radical
postmodernists”
S: “Right.”
J: “because they weren’t. But they were trying to solve this
problem to some degree of our fundamental ignorance and our inability
to be certain about the nature of reality that surrounds us.”
My response: We are fundamentally ignorant but that does not serve as
a first premise for concluding that perspectival, epistemological
skepticism is our lot. We can know objective reality in both its
spiritual and material essence, with high probable certainty that we
are gaining knowledge. Ayn Rand points out that we are not born
knowledgeable, but by living, reflecting, observing, reasoning and
conceptualizing, we gain knowledge which is cumulative and
progressive, not revolutionary and fragmented as Thomas Kuhn
insisted.
S: “Yes, okay. Let’s set aside Sam Harris’s version of this and
focus on the Pragmatist tradition here. So, no, you are absolutely
right. The Pragmatists (William James (1842-1910), John Dewey
(1859-1952) and the others, late 1800s, early 1900s; they are coming
a century after the Kantian revolution (Immanuel Kant), after
Hegelianism, and so forth—and so they are very much trying to solve
this problem one way.
And this is kind of an American way, is like: Look, maybe the problem
with philosophy is that we have been too intellectualizing of
cognition, that we are not just disembodied brains, or disembodied
minds that are trying to contemplate abstract truths in some other
realm. Maybe what we need to do is understand the mind and cognition
as a naturalistic process and that the purpose of knowledge is not to
come up with these pure and beautiful Truths (Ed says: God wants us
to let our cognition and run wild, do wild, useless speculative
intellectual free associating, as well as doing mundane, practical,
pragmatic investigations—all are necessary and useful, later in
ways not yet known, if not immediately applicable.) that are going to
be kind of museum pieces that we admire but rather the purpose of
philosophy is functional.
The purpose of knowledge is to guide action, and so they will then
hearken back to earlier Baconian tradition that knowledge is not an
end in itself (Ed Says: I partially disagree.). As Bacon put it,
Francis Bacon: Knowledge is power and by its fruits, so to speak, is
how you know its worth.”
J: “Right.”
S: “And so what we then should do is see that the test of truth is
not whether it meets purely intellectual standards of logic and
mathematics but rather, when we put it into practice, when we act
upon it, we actually need good results or we want the results we
want, or I get the results I want. And it can come in more
individualistic form or more socialized form.”
J: “Right, because then we can get on with things too. Like,
despite our ignorance, in some sense.”
S: “So there are two things that are being packaged here, right.
One is to say that knowledge is functional. And that part I think is
important, and I think it’s a nice correction by the pragmatists.”
My response: Elsewhere, Hicks has noted that to thrive, humans need
to use their powers of reason, their cognitive tool, to make
observations, to reach conclusions, to generalize from research
conducted. Then they use this rational prowess and knowledge gleaned
from reality this way to act in the world.
So it appears to me that Rand and Hicks both espouse that what we
learn and conclude are tools for us to apply it to do work in the
world, and though they are not Pragmatists, there is some convergence
in thinking going on here.
I detect a previously undiscovered, latent moderation at work in
Objectivist thinking, not even recognized by themselves: that we need
to be practical and function in the world to thrive, meet our
teleological final cause, and to avoid just barely existing as
armchair theorists.
S: “It is not original with them but they are reemphasizing it in
the 19th century. Knowledge needs to be put to the test
and its ability to enable us to be pragmatic in the real world is its
test.”
J: “There is a coda to that as well. And I think this is relevant
to Thomas Kuhn’s discussion of scientific revolutions, because Kuhn
is read as often positing a sequence of, in some sense, discontinuous
revolutions, and that the conceptual structure that characterized
some ‘epoch’ let’s say—like the Medieval epoch—was so
totally different it its presuppositions from the conceptions that
characterized the next epoch—that you can’t even mediate between
them in some sense. Now the reason that I’m bringing this up is
because Kuhn is read as hypothesizing that there’s not any
necessary progress when you make leaps from one conceptual system to
another.
But if you take this pragmatic approach—the one that we’ve been
outlining—it seems to me you can say, well. It’s something like
this: your conceptions of the world are more tool-like than
objective-truth-like, and tools can have a greater or lesser range of
convenience.”
My response: As an epistemological moderate and common-sensical
laborer, it seems to me to be advantageous to test to make sure that
one’s narratives or theories seem to work in reality, but I think
Jordan is not sufficiently Objectivist and truth-capturing as he
should be and could become if he seeks to reduce, limit if not
outright abandon the corrosive influence of the skepticism,
subjectivity, and relativism, which are part and parcel of the
Pragmatist philosophy, upon his thinking and capacity to gain
knowledge about the world. He is needlessly curtailing his power to
uncover new truths as he studies the world.
J: “And so if you come up with a really good tool—which is also
something that would look objectively true—generally speaking—then
that’s something that you can use in almost every situation, and it
will never fail you.
And I would think of something like Newtonian physics in that regard,
or even more particularly, quantum mechanics, because it’s never
failed us. And so it seems to me the Pragmatic approach in some sense
allows you to have your cake and eat it too.
You can posit a hierarchy of truths, moving towards absolute truth
even, but you can also retain your belief in your own ignorance and
not have to beat the drum too hard about the ‘eternal accuracy’
of your objective presuppositions.”
My response: Peterson’s blending of pragmatic lesser truth with a
reaching for absolute truth seems to come close to my approach which
is that we can achieve practical certainty in our knowledge claims
but not absolute certainty, and that is not a bad achievement, and it
will have to do.
S: “Okay. Again I’m sympathetic I think to about 80 percent of
that. But let me put my skeptical hat back on and say how the
postmodernists or the critics of Pragmatism—critics really of the
first generation Pragmatism—will respond to that. So if we say, so
if we then say: All of these cognitive results—I’m going to
rephrase that.”
J: “Okay.”
S: “So if we’re going to assess all of our cognitive results or
cognitive hypotheses in terms of their workability, or their ‘getting
what I want’, or ‘what we want. And where did these ‘wants’
come from? And why should we accept wants and desires and achieving
certain goals as our bottom line, so to speak?”
J: “Right, okay? That’s right. So you can start to question the
framework, the validity of the framework within which you’re
constructing your answer.”
S: “That’s right. And at this point we’re reading epistemology
neutrally so to speak and moving into the normative issues, then the
whole status of normative goals—ends and the means that are going
to enable us to read these ends—comes into play. So what I want to
say. The most important thing is that I—I’ll put it badly here—I
get what I want, right? And I’m going to assess intellectual
structures and beliefs and hypotheses in terms of, Do they give me
what I want? Well, that sounds, already sounds like a fairly
normative, subjectivistic stand point. Like why should you take your
wants as having some sort of high status that everything has to be
evaluated in terms of?”
J: “Uh, huh.”
S: “And then philosophically we say: were do wants come from? And
of course there’s a long anthropological and psychological set of
literature here. What’s the relationship of our wants? Are they
based in biological drives? Are they instinctual? Are they acquired?
Are they intellectual? Do they have any relationship to our rational
capacities?”
My response: It may seem that our wants are subjective and normative,
but they may be also objectively normative if nature is suffused with
moral facts, as I presuppose. Yes, our wants grow out of our natures
biologically, our instincts, from the way we grew up, but they are
also some primordial, perhaps spiritual craving for meaning, for God,
or are also driven by our need as free agents to think and use
language to think new thoughts, to discover new things, to character
reality in some original way.”
S: “When I’m acting should I act on my wants, and so forth?”
My response: I would be hesitant and cautious about advising any
human to just satisfy any want they have: fulfilling a want, be it a
temptation or rational goal, may be praiseworthy if it coheres with
egoist ethics, with the Ten Commandments and God’s will (What God
wills for us is not easy to detect and explain.).
S: “So there’s that full tradition, and we have to have a
sophisticated theory about how all of that is going to work if we’re
going to say we’ll solve all these cognitive, epistemological
issues in terms of wants or the satisfaction of desires or the
achievement of goals the way Pragmatists want us to do.
And again, it is fairly easy to imagine what the skeptical argument
is likely going to be, if it’s a matter of what I want—well,
isn’t science supposed to be about coming up with general truths or
even universal truths?”
J: “Okay.”
S: “And if it’s immediately going to devolve into whatever
individuals want, well then we’re going in fairly scattered
directions.”
J: “Okay, so that opens up a good point for a segue into the
potential link between Neo-Marxism, let’s say and the postmodernism
issue,
Maybe you could say: once you’ve opened the door to an admission
that you can criticize—the idea of want as a social construct,
let’s say, which is one of the things that you intimate (not the
only thing obviously)—then you open the door to also making the
claim that that social contract that governs the ‘wants,’ that
governs the ‘truth’ can be governed by power relationships,
something like that, and then by unfair power relationships.”
My response: Wants and truths in part of social constructs, and
governed by power relationships, but, more so they are objective and
realist, and governed by cooperative and competitive social
relationships in a civil society, one not governed by warring
factions just striving for power..
S: “Exactly.”
J: “So you can spin off down that aisle. And that’s the other
thing I really want to talk to you about, because on the one hand the
postmodernists are following this intellectual tradition of the
critique of Western thinking, which is exactly in some sense what
philosophy should be doing. But in another way, they seem
simultaneously by sleight of hand, a kind of social critique that has
its origin more in political revolution, and class-based theory. And
they do that under the guise of pure philosophy, in some sense, but
with the intent and motivation of something like justifying the
social revolution, or continuing the Marxist analysis of power
differential.”
S: “It can go both ways, yes. Right. It is possible to follow the
road that we’ve just been going down, to say, well, you know, if
it’s a matter about what works for you, then that immediately
starts to sound too relativistic and subjectivistic and we don’t
have an explanation and an answer to all the weirdos who want to do
some strange things—because that’s what they want to do—so we
might introduce as a corrective a socializing of the process.”
J: “Right.”
S: “So we might say, no, it’s not so much what you want as an
individual, but rather what we want, and we have to achieve some kind
of consensus here. So that’s a slightly cartoon version, but the
difference as between William James, and John Dewey in the next
generation who collectivized things a little bit more. So then we
have a corrective on all the individual weirdos—who knows what
their desires and goals are going to be?”
J: “Right.”
S: “But anyway of course we just confront the same problem there,
as soon as we start doing anthropology, because then if we say: well,
if we relativize it to the social group, when we start looking at
different social groups—obviously different social groups have
dramatically different wants and needs, and they’ve evolved very
different traditions.”
My response: If I follow these two professors closely, they are
agreeing that postmodernists, skeptical of grand narratives, the
powers of reason and realist claims, would replace all such
objectivist assertions with relativists and subjectivistic competing,
different claims about competing wants and needs , amongst rival
individuals, and amongst rival groups or tribes. There is no
agreement on what is right and how to proceed.
S: “And if it’s a matter of saying, ‘What’s true is what
works for the groups,’ there is no uber group or highest group of
all groups that has status over all the others. And if you do—and
this is the second point that you said exactly right—then you’re
saying, ‘Well, no, no, this group’s norms and goals are better
than that group’s goals and norms.’”
J: “Right.”
My response: Notice how both of these experts on postmodernism agree
that postmodernists start of with epistemological, skeptical
dismissal of grand modernist narratives, but somehow they become
realist and ideologically fanatical, absolutely sure of their
morality, rightness and obligation to crush the world into accepting
their power-based, Communist principles and imperialistic grand
narratives. Postmodernists, when the underdog talk epistemological
relativism, but as victorious revolutionaries, then surfacing are
their genuine views, their ultraist, dogmatic epistemology, their
absolutist ideology and totalitarian, Marxist power arrangements are
powerfully imperialistic and viciously, violently tyrannical.
S: “And then your into what the critics are going to call
‘imperialism’ of the inappropriate form.”
J: “Right and so that leaves us with our current political
situation in some sense, because that idea has been taken to that’s
a logical conclusion, and that logical conclusion has now been
instantiated to a large degree as an intellectual and political
activist movement, I would say.”
S: “Right, sure, absolutely. So it can start as an intellectual
movement and what we’re trying to do is some hard-core
epistemology. And we go to the Empiricists and the Rationalists, and
the Kantian Revolution and the Pragmatists, right? And now we’re in
the second generation Pragmatism where we relativize into various
cognitive groups, and then we’re just kind of stuck in a kind of
group relativism, and in the operational principles socially then is
going to be that each group so to speak should stick to itself and
not think that it can impose its ideas and its norms on any other
groups, right?
All groups, so to speak, are equal.”
J: “Yeah, well at least they have an equal claim to their
formulation of the truth. The problem with the postmodern conjunction
with Neo-Marxism to me seems to be the acceptance of the idea that
there’s an intrinsic moral claim by the dispossessed to the
obtaining of status and that actually constitutes a higher moral
calling in and of itself.”
My response: The postmodernists are tricksters and hypocrites: they
present this intrinsic moral claim of behalf of the dispossessed as
binding on the world—sure sounds like a grand narrative to me.
J: “So they’re swallowing a moral claim in making it universal in
some sense at the same time they criticize the idea of say general
narratives or universal moral claims.”
S: “So okay, now that’s also right. That’s the other way to say
that. Rather than starting with epistemology and getting to a kind of
cultural relativism, you can start of course committed to a certain
normative framework or a certain kind of ideological framework (as
Marxism) where you’re very critical of one of these traditions, and
then the cultural relativism can be part of that that you use to
criticize the tradition internally so to speak.
Now then we come explicitly into—not a kind of metaethics and
asking where we get our ethical principles off the ground but—where
do they come from in the first place, but kind of a robust, normative
ethics where people have commitments to a fairly strong ethical
principles and ethical ideals.
This is where the debate between, say Nietzsche and Marx becomes
relevant. This is a late 19rth century debate. So suppose we say as
both the Marxists and the Nietzscheans do, let’s say, there is no
‘Truth’ in any objective sense. All we have is subjectivity and
relativity of various sorts, and we have different individuals and
different groups.
And they’re in antagonistic relationships with each other, and that
means there’s not really going to be any rational and civilized
resolution of their discussions with each other. Instead, it all
comes down to power.”
My response: Ideologues of all stripes, including cultural Marxists,
all of these true believers with their guru leader, their mass
movement and their holy cause, they talk epistemological relativism,
subjectivism and skepticism in order to deconstruct, confuse, upset
and jerk the masses away from the traditional grand narratives
underpinning the status quo, which the radicals and revolutionaries
aim to overthrow.
Once they gain power, their actual epistemological and political
stances are openly announced and admitted to: absolutist,
totalitarian, violently and intolerantly enforced upon all dissidents
to guarantee universal compliance. The view that all boils down to
power struggles between rival groups and rival individuals is a
cynical, corrupt, nihilistic view of human nature and human
interrelating within communities and their overarching polity.
This power patten is the collectivist-altruists power arrangement
which I refer to as the power of powerlessness, or evil power
dynamics.
Elsewhere Hicks refers to modernist populations in the West in their
capitalist democracies cooperating and gently competing but leading
prosperous, peaceful, amicable, civil lawful lives and these power
relations governing those communities and those polities is what I
refer to as the power of powerfulness, or good power
J: “Yeah, and that’s the strange sleight of hand there too
because why has it come down to power? Again, that seems to introduce
the idea of necessary need.”
My response: Necessary need presupposes that there are universal laws
governing human behavior and social relations, and that is a grand
narrative of the social and natural laws governing human and their
societies, and the phrase “grand narrative” describes that
necessary need, for power and conflict between groups with the
perfervid Marxists all of a sudden presenting to the public the
sweeping claim that a paramount priority for society is granting all
power, wealth and legal cover to minority groups and the materially
dispossessed being in need to get the goods and to run society over
their former oppressors.
S: “Okay, okay, yes, all right. That’s another thing. Let’s set
that aside for a moment. Yep, okay. So then we say, okay, so we have
power. And one thing we can say is while we don’t think any one
individual, or any one group, has a better objective claim to truth
or better ideals, it’s nonetheless the case that some individuals
and some groups have more power than others.
And we have to make our allegiance clear is this unequal power
struggle: Are we on the side of those who have more power, or are we
on the side of those who have less power? And that’s where we get
then a Nietzschean and a Marxian ‘fork in the road.’”
My response: The postmodernist emphasis on power is immoral and
unsatisfactory because it is group power, the evil power of
powerlessness, the struggle between rival tribes, or haves and
have-nots. The future they are offering is but a continuation of the
sad human past: endless conflict, warring, want, tyranny, bloodshed,
elites spouting their varied ideologies, nationalist or tribal,
sacred or secular, Marxist or Neitzschean.
When the dust settles, it is always the same: just another elite
element of society living off of the masses, reimposing stratified
class systems in each polity—just the latest versions of
dysfunctional revolutionaries replacing the old elite, with no end of
the dysfunctionality and perpetual class struggling. The postmodern
paradigm of power-sharing and power-grabbing is not the way to
analyze society’s or problems or the way to solve society’s
problems.
Rather we require society be run along the lines of the power of
powerfulness, good power, individual power where each citizen has
assumed the role of anarchist individuator supercitizen in a
constitutional republic with free enterprise economics, where per
citizen power-ownership, property-ownership and wealth ownership are
roughly equal and relations are peaceful, prosperous, cooperative
with gentle competition. It is not whether to back Nietzsche and the
haves or Marx and the have-nots: this is a false alternative about
personal, intrapersonal and interpersonal power relations and
dominant patterns. Only supercitizenized individuals as
individuators wielding the power of powerfulness can reform and
revolutionize society peacefully, and make that gentle revolution
work and last.
S: “So the Nietzscheans, following Nietzsche, will say: Look, it’s
all about power. We can try on some crude revolutionary thinking
here: It’s only by exercising power by the stronger, the fitter,
the healthier, and so forth, who are willing to impose their power on
the weaker and use them for their own ends that we as individuals and
groups are going to make any sort of progress towards the next best
thing, whatever that is. So in the power struggle there is no
objective morality (The promoters of good power, individual power,
the power of powerfulness firmly disagree: they assert that moral
facts exist and that objective truth is knowable as natural ruling
human conducts and operations and that we must abide by them—Ed
says.), no objective truth. We just throw our lot in with the
stronger, with the richer, with the more powerful, and say: whatever
they do to advance themselves, that is the normative best that we can
do. And of course there’s a kind of long aristocratic tradition in
normative thinking that one can draw on to support that.
And then the Marxists of course are just on the other side of the
equation where their sympathies initially are going to say, in any
power struggle, ‘Our a priori commitment should always be with the
weaker, to those on the losing end of history, those who suffer and
so forth.
And its always the bad, rich and powerful people who are oppressing
and harming them. And so we throw our lot in with the weaker, and
we’re willing to use that power, whatever amount of power we have,
on behalf of the weaker.”
My response: Here again, fanatically acting, fanatically speaking,
and supposedly fanatically thinking, and by advertising that she is
for no compromise, no moral shades of gray ever, Rand’s actual
Objectivist philosophy, at its core--unintendedly even by Rand
herself--is politically and morally moderate—despite her
protestations to the contray.
She and her—The Atlas Society/unorthodox Randians—David Kelley
and Stephen Hicks—followers denounce and do so rightly denounce the
altruist-collectivist ethical and moral theory promoting tyranny,
class systems and endless human right abuses, grounded in the evil
power system, the power of powerlessness, so favored and practices by
the elites, both Marxist and Neitzschean.
In her often confused if brilliant way, Rand is approaching Eric
Hoffer’s and my desire and recognition that the global need for
humans to find peace, liberty, prosperity, civil-society-living in a
free market constitutional republic without debilitating caste system
institutions and structure, can only be sought, gained and kept if
the masses as adults run everything always as the majority of them
achieve and enjoy their liberty and share of the communal power of
powerfulness power model (The benevolent power model growing out of
and based on an ethical and political theory of
egoism-individualism.) as affluent, propertied, upper middle class
anarchist individuating supercitizens. Notice just below this
paragraph where Stephen Hicks advises rejecting the really major
false alternative of the 20th century, that one must
choose sides, loyal to the Nietzscheans or the Marxists.
J; "Right.”
S: “And then we’re just into what I think of as the really major
false alternative that really has driven much o 20th
century intellectual life. Are you a Nietzschean or a Marxist?”
J: “Right, right. Well, okay so now we can get to the crux of the
matter here to some degree because even to engage in that argument
means to accept the a priori position which you’ve really made
rationally compelling, let’s say, that it’s power. It’s power
because there’s no other way of differentiating between claims of
different groups, it’s power that’s the determining issue.”
S: “Yes.”
My response: Stephen is agreeing with Jordan’s statement that
power-wielding is human action in the world, that power as human
action is an external instantiation of human thinking, motives and
planning, that in that sense human living boils down to
power-patterns exercised in society by humans.
If we all accept and agree that human activity and desires in some
sense can be distilled down to power relations among people in
society, then we need to make clear if humans, when all is said and
done will hold and wield power, to exist, even stay alive. We then
need to correct the mistaken thinking of postmodernists in
concluding metaphysically, socially, politically and morally, that
the power-wielding relations among rival groups in society—along
the line of their favored power model, the power of
powerlesssness--will not work or help people, as that destructive
power model is unleashed, operating among civilian population.
Are the subjectivistic, relativistic, tyrannical and often violent
power-wielding behaviors among humans as characterized and promoted
by the postmodernists actually human reality, and the preferred way
for humans to conduct their incredibly deep, complex rich
interrelationships? No it is not.
Would an impartial social scientist like Eric Hoffer, studying the
power-wielding interactions and actions among humans, agree with the
postmodernists that they rightly can prove and patently demonstrate
that endless power struggles and conflict among competing individuals
and warring groups is justifiable as just the way the world
works--That impartial social scientist would advise us to reject all
political theories crafted by postmodernists? No, he would not.
The postmodernists maintain that what each rival group values, with
their projecting upon society their subjective, provisional
intellectual assertions, wants and needs, that these quarrels and
disagreements cannot be definitively or ultimately settled
intellectually or peacefully to everyone’s satisfaction.
None can determine who is right or deserving anyway, but just through
bloody battling until a winner emerges is the way to establish order
and structure among people in society, and sets things up so the
victors and survivor have the power, money and positions of power,
that the elite ruling this new class of victors will implement and
execute society-wide compliance with the narratives and bylaws of the
holy cause now in ascendance. The emergent, victorious group and its
governing elite will now run society. That it is reality and perhaps
just and right in a strange way that the prevailing group favored by
history and Fate should run things.
Stephen is admitting that whatever one’s moral theory, one’s
pessimism or dogmatism about the existence of objective moral truths
and grand narratives, one will seek to influence how society operates
in line with each movements social and political program, and that is
seeking the power to take over and control society along the lines of
action they favor.
Stephen is agreeing with the postmodernist cynics that it all boils
down to power at the metaphysical core—be that the irreducible
primary of human concerns or not—practically people will seek to
run things along the lines favored by their group and their holy
cause.
He is a realist and reformer so, if I may paraphrase him in a way
which is compatible with my power-wielding model of power, he wants
societies run along lines of individuals and groups living freely and
prosperously with limited government and small institutions with the
power of powerfulness as their theory of practice of political power
sharing and wielding.
J: “But that’s something that I really have a problem with. And I
think it’s of crucial importance, because first of all I think
there’s a big difference between power and authority and
competence.”
My response: Jordan and I use different terms, but the concept, the
base narrative for human existing is that that rival groups play
deadly, violent, power games, power-warring and power-seeking, that
leftist ideologue pushed by the postmodern under the justification of
fighting for social justice, is a synonym for evil power—in
Jordan’s parlance, and the collectivist power of powerlessness, in
my technical language.
Healthy, democratic, voluntary, peaceful, cooperative power-sharing
arrangement by those who meritorious are in charge, in authority and
are competent is close to my term of the positive kind of power to be
sought and wielded is the individualistic power of powerfulness.
J: “Those are all not the same thing because you might be willing
to cede greater status to me in some domains if there are things I
can do, that you value, that you can’t do. And that’s not power
exactly.
Power seems to be more that I’m willing to use force to improve my
interpretation of the world to get my wants fulfilled on you, and it
seems to me that is where the Marxists make a huge mistake—not that
the Nietzscheans are making mistakes as well—but where the Marxists
make a huge mistake is that they fail to properly differentiate
between hierarchies of interpretation that are predicated on
tyrannical force, and hierarchies o interpretation predicated on
authority, competence, and mutual consent.”
My response: Anyone who uses forces and revolution, even in the name
of bringing justice to the weak and powerless, uses a violent, evil
means, the power of powerlessness, and the revolutionaries will set
up a polity as vicious as or likely even worse than the corrupt,
oppressive existent status quo, It is a moral law of the universe
that violent means of bringing up reform always perverts and
undermines the noble goal, making evil conditions in the world bad or
worse than previously because the so-called revolution in effect is
a mere coup de’tat, replacing old elite with its grand narratives,
substituting a new strong man with a changed ideology often more
dangerous than what was in place, or if it is revolutionary, it is
totalitarian rather than authoritarian, making a bad situation much
worse.
J: “The other issue they fail to contend with—and this I believe
is a form of willful blindness—is that it isn’t obviously the
case that every society is set up equally to only fulfill the desires
of people who are, in principle, situated at the pinnacles of the
hierarchies.
I don’t think actually think that’s, that’s fundamentally
characteristic of the Western tradition, because it has a very strong
emphasis—weirdly enough—and this is how I think it extracts
itself out of the conundrum which accepting socialized version of the
truth presents to you.
The West does two things: (1) It says, we have a social contract
which constrains our views of the world and our actions in it, but
(2) that social contract is also simultaneously subordinate to the
idea of the sovereignty of each individual. And so the social
contract then is bound to serve the needs of each individual—not
any privileged set of individuals, although sometimes it works out
that way.
And I don’t believe postmodernists have contended that properly
with their criticism of logocentrism, for example, which was
something that characterized Derrida. That never seemed to me that
what you had with Stalinist Russia and the Marxist view of the world,
and what you had on the side of the West, was merely a matter of
difference of opinion between two equally valid, socialized modes of
interpreting the world you know. There’s something wrong about
this. There’s something more to the view of the West than what’s
embodied in the conflict between socialism and capitalism.
Because it could have just been a matter of argumentation and
opinion, but I think that that’s faulty. I thought this way in part
because of Piaget, you know, because Piaget was interested in what
the intrinsic constraints were on the social contract. And he said he
was trying to address this issue of the insufficiency of want as a
tool to justify you claims to truth.
That’s when he introduced the idea of equilibrated state. So if
you’re sophisticated, you have to put forward you want and then
meet it in a way that will meet it today, and tomorrow, and next
month, and next year, and in a decade. So you have to iterate
yourself across time, and you have to take all of the iterations of
yourself and then you also have to do the same thing as you extend
yourself out into the social community. So it has to be what’s good
for me now and repetitively into the future in a manner that’s
simultaneously good for you now and simultaneously into the future.”
S: “Uh-huh.”
J: “And that starts to become and he thought about it as the
playable game, something like that, the voluntary playable game. And
there’s something deep about that because it includes the idea of
iteration, you have iterated interpretations into the equation, which
strikes me as of crucial importance.”
S: “Okay, yes, right. Again, I count about six very interesting
sub-topics built into that, and the latter part is a very nice
statement. I think a kind of Enlightenment humanism where we’re
going to take power seriously but we’re going to restrain power in
a way that respects the individuals to form mutually beneficial
social networks across time, and so on.
And I’m very sympathetic to that overall construction. And that
comes out of then the first part which as a taxonomy that you’re
offering about the nature of power—and that taxonomy does different
significantly from both the Marxist and Nietzschean ones. Now what
I’d say is that I think it’s better to take power more neutrally
so there’s a continuity with what the physicists do. And my
understanding there is that power is just the ability to get work
done.”
J: “Uh-huh.”
S: “So you can put that in tool and functionality language. Power
is what gets you from A to B.”
J: “Right, right which is also, I love that description because it
fits very nicely in with the narrative conceptualization (S: “Yes.”)
of being, because narratives seems to be descriptions, descriptions
of something like how to get from Point A to Point B.”
S: “Right. But it also doesn’t say anything about B and the
status of B. How we choose where we should be going, what our ends
are, or what our goals are—so in that sense, power is normatively
neutral—it is a means to an end, and that means when we try to
evaluate the use of power, we’re going to be evaluating power in
terms of the ends towards which it is put, if I can end with that
preposition there.
So now, we can say: okay, well, power comes in all kinds of forms.
I’m quite happy to say there is intellectual power: that’s the
ability to use our minds to address and solve certain problems.
There’s muscular power: the ability to move physical objects.
There’s social power people respect you and are willing to spend
time with you, and direct resources to you voluntarily, and so forth.
There’s military power, political power and so forth. And so we can
have a whole set of subspecies of power. And what they all have in
common is in each of these domains there are goals, and having power
enables you to choose your goals in those domains.”
J: “Right, and we shouldn’t fall prey to the illusion that these
are necessarily any like—what would you call it—unifying
matrix—that makes all those different forms of power importantly
similar except for the terminology, you know? I mean—and this is
another thing that bothers me about both the Nietzschean and Marxist
view, is that there’s this proclivity to collapse these multiple
modes of power into power itself. And that’s not reasonable, so
because it’s reasonable to note that many forms of power that
you’ve just described control against one another. It’s like the
balance of power in a polity like the American polity.”
My response: Collapsing modes of power into a general or universal
power category seems logical and probably natural, but to what end is
power aimed—towards benevolent, freedom-inducing power of
powerfulness, or towards expanding tyrannical, cruel power of
powerlessness—that is a moral imperative to get it right, to direct
the power one wields towards appropriate ends.
S: “Yes, I think that’s a deep point you are making, and I think
that both the Marxists and the Nietzscheans do end up collapsing
power into a unitary type, and that’s a mistake. But that’s a
mistake only if you deny, as both the Marxists and Nietzscheans do,
that there’s a deep individuality about the world.
So, if you think, by contrast, about the kind of individualist
rights—respecting Enlightenment vision that you are articulating,
and that I agree with as well: normatively that wants to devolve
social power to the individual with a great deal of
self-responsibility and control over their own domain so to speak.”
My response: The Marxists—including to postmodernists—and the
Nietzscheans promote evil power, collectivist, authoritarian power of
powerlessness, and Hick is in favor the non-unitary, dispersed
handling power by individuals, using it separately from each other,
and power by them is being applied with ways normatively consistent
with individualistic, democratic patterns of benevolent power
application, the power of powerfulness, and Hick’s view largely is
identical to my sense of how power is to be shared and implemented by
individualists in society as the societal norm and ideal in practice.
S: “And the idea then is that if we are going to form social
relationships, or any form of social interaction, it has to be
mutually respecting: that I have to respect your control over your
domain and you respect my control over my domain, but we agree to
share domains, so to speak, voluntarily to a certain point.”
My response: Amen.
J: “It also means—and this is a place where I think where
postmodernists are really open to, you might say, conceptual
assault—is that you know, in order to have that freedom devolve
upon the individual in that manner it also means the individual has
to take responsibility”
My response: Of course the individual should be responsible ethically
while wielding power, but Peterson elsewhere later revealed what he
meant here, that the individual’s freedom is to live a life a
sacrifice for the good of others and society, rather than emphasize
pursuit of his own interests, for egoistically seeking his own ends
or happiness, and that emphasis on duty and responsibility is serving
others at one’s own expense, if overemphasized as Jordan intends,
well, that overemphasis undermines egoist mission for the individual
being empowered to control power over his own affairs, it curtails
the goodness of the individual’s power operations, wielding a
weakened, reduced power of powerfulness or good power.
S: “Right.”
J: “for acting as a locus of power in the world, actual
responsibility, and cannot conceive of themselves or act in a manner
that only makes them an avatar of a social movement. I think that
part of the perfervid anti-individualism of the radical Left is
precisely predicated on that refusal to take responsibility,”
My response: Here is where Jordan and I part ways a bit: his
altruistic dislike for individualism allows him to substitute his
weaker promotion of individualism as the agent taking responsibility,
being self-sacrificing, spending his life serving others, and that is
a significant aspect of being an authentic, moral, engaged
individualists, but it is insufficient.
The stronger version of individualism to be promoted is something
like the rationalism egoism touted by the followers of Ayn Rand, but
both demands are to be met in each individual agent.
Leftists are altruists, collectivists, and promoters of centralized
power, and they seek to overthrow the American culture of strong
individualism, which is spiritually and morally good, and that is
what these wicked promoters of group power of powerlessness hate,
really hate, and seek always to eliimnate.
J: “and I think that also is reflected in the fact that, by
temperament, they’re low in ‘trait conscientiousness’. So it’s
deep, it’s not merely an opinion; it’s an expression of something
that’s even deeper than opinion.”
S: “Okay, yes, that phrase ‘locus of responsibility’, locus of
power, locus of control—you’re right that the Far Left in Marxist
and Neo-Marxist form does deny that, but you find that in the
Far-Right.”
My response: Yes, Far-Rightists and Far-Leftists are on the same
team, and those promoting individualism, capitalism, liberalism and
the sovereignty of the individual as a free, rational moral agent,
are the enemy perfervidly hated by both Far-Rightists and
Far-Leftists, who would prefer to imprison, torture and even kill
staunch, resistant individualists, if the ideological true believers
could have their way.
J: Yes, you find that among ideologues in general.”
My response: Without either of them, in the conversational exchanges
between them just above, implicitly end up supporting without being
aware of their supporting me in my claim of a family connection or
likeness roughly lining up together how ideologues of all
stripes—true believers
notice that they agree and I conclude and agree that ideologues
across the political spectrum, despite their categorical claims of
being radically different from one another, share a deep, vicious
hatred of individualists free confident independent who think for
themselves, make their own decisions and run their own private lives.
I note the powerful, intimate link in the following characteristics
shared by ideologues of all stripes: their epistemological/fanatical
claims of possessing certain knowledge, their altruistic and
collectivistic solutions to human problems—ethically, politically
and socially—to be brought about by force and kept in place over
the masses with legal, federal authority.
They want the masses to be groupists and mass movement members, and
sheep herded about by government shepherds meek, unquestioning,
dependent, humbled without self-confidence or self-esteem.
I seek the individualist sovereignty socially, legally, politically
and economically, rational, confident with narratives of solid
knowledge and high probable certainty without claims of inerrancy or
doctrinal infallibility, which is unattainable epistemologically and
is therefore a lie and absurd to seek after, pointless. In essence I
connect individualism with ideological moderation and personal
responsibility as morally good and desirable. By contrast, the
totalitarian ideologues tout altruism-collectivism, and fanaticism
and no personal responsibility so they promote what is evil and bad
for people. They also lie and call what is good evil and what is evil
good.
S: “Right, so this a bit of cartoon intellectual history, but then
you have to trace it to Marxists on the Left and the Nietzscheans on
the Right, both of them deny that individuals are loci of
responsibility. Both of them in their view of human nature have
strongly deterministic views.”
My response: Ideologues are authoritarian and deny that people have
free will or should even be encouraged to think and decide for
themselves, that they are just group avatars, tabula rasas for their
dictator, their holy cause guru, and their group of affiliation to
write on, to remake them as these sources of power choose to direct
them on what to think and act.
By contrast individualism moral goodness rationalism free will
capitalism, liberty, republicanism and moderation all flow together
and reinforce each other.
S: “What we call an individual according to both of them is just a
vehicle through which outside forces are flowing so to speak.”
J: “Right. You can see that in some sense as a consequence of the
scientific revolution.”
S: “Yes.”
J: “Because you still see this among modern scientists: It’s
like: ‘Okay, what are the causal forces that determine human
behavior?’ Okay, there’s two primary source: nature/biology and
culture.”
S: “So. It’s the crude ‘Nature vs. Nurture’ debate being
played out through them. Yes.”
J: “Right, and so in my opinion and I’ve derived this conclusion
from studying mythology, mostly—there’s a missing third element
there which is whatever it is that constitutes the active force of
individual consciousness. And we don’t have a good conceptual
schema for that”
My response: Jordan makes an incisive point here, one that he has
mentioned elsewhere that Nature and Nurture are two vying realities
or forces of nature clashing with one another, but both are polar and
deterministic; it is the human individual, influenced from both
polls, through his emergent rational, free-willing consciousness, the
moderate middle between the two extremist polls, that wills to run
his own life to be self-causing and, if he chooses, be a force for
good and make the world a better place than when he entered it.
S: “Right, self-responsibility and being an independent initiator
of power, instead of a merely responder to other power forces, or a
vehicle through which those other power forces operate.”
J: “Right.”
S: “So, yes, individualism that is built into Enlightenment
humanism—you start to see it developing in Renaissance humanism—is
to take seriously the notion that individuals have some significant
measure of control over their thoughts, over their actions, to shape
their own character”
My response: The unspoken premise here is that individuals as
individual-livers, animated by using their free will, their rational
abilities, their capacity for action and cosmos-creation, are the
freest creature in nature. To be an individual is to be liberated,
logical, conscious, volitional, awake, self-causal, moderate.
J: “Right.”
S: “to shape their own destinies and that is fundamental to one’s
moral dignity as a human being. And so that view of human nature is
built into this fundamentally. And then all of social relationships
have to be respectful of that individuality, and then, consequently,
when we start to turn to political theory, and we talk about very
heavy-duty uses of power, such as the police and military—we want
to have some serious constraints on government power to make sure we
are respecting individual sovereignty.”
My response: In a democracy or constitutional republic, the
individual is sovereign, and governmental, legal, institutional and
social pressures are constrained in their wielders desires to stifle
individual liberty, sovereignty and power-wielding.
In a totalitarian state, the group is sovereign, the wills of each
citizen is not free, and altruistic-collectivistic morality holds
humans down and back, a tyrannical pressurization pushing down on
people in ruinous fashion.
J: “Okay. And here’s something perverse too that emerges as a
consequence of something you pointed out earlier in the conversation,
you know. You mentioned that when modernism emerged out of
Medievalism, that two things happened. One was the elaboration of the
conceptual frames that enabled us to deal with the external world.
But the other was the elevation of the individual to the status of
valued critic, predicated on the idea that there was something
actually valid about individual experience as such.
Now the problem there, as far as I can tell—and maybe this is part
of the reason we’re in this conundrum—is that the elaboration of
the objective, scientific viewpoint left us with the idea that it was
either nature or nurture that was the source of human motive power.
But the missing element there is: well, if that’s the case then why
grant the individual to begin with the role of independent social
critics?”
S: “Exactly.”
J: “Like, on what grounds do you, it’s like a residual belief in
something like the autonomy of the soul, which you cannot sneak in,
and not justify without problems like ones that we have now.”
S: “Yes, now that’s well put. And I think it’s fair to say that
we are still in the infancy of the psychological sciences.”
My response: I agree with Stephen statement above.
S: “You can speak to that better than I can but, as someone in
philosophy, I think we are still at the beginnings. And we are till
in the grip of early and crude versions of scientific understandings
of how cause and effect operates. So what we are starting with is
very mechanical understandings, and we can understand how people then
are pushed around by biological forces. We can understand to some
extent how they’re pushed around by external, physical and
mechanical forces. But we do not yet have a sophisticated
understanding of the human brain, the human mind, human psychology to
understand how a volitional consciousness can be a causal force, a
causal force in the world.”
My response: Stephen’s point about the crudeness of the science of
psychology, an admission that neuroscientists lack a sophistical
explanation of what human consciousness is and how it works. One need
only follow cursorily the unanswerable questions raised by Robert
Lawerence Kuhn in his Closer To Truth television series to realize
that we really do not definitively know what human conspicuousness
is.
J: “Right. That’s perfectly well put so I do a detailed analysis
that some of the people who watch me are familiar with, of this
movie, Pinocchio and Pinocchio has got a, a very classical
mythological structure, and it basically introduces three elements of
being: so there’s, so there’s (1) The element of being that is
associated with Gepetto, and also, (2) the evil, tyrannical forces
that are kind of patriarchal in nature. And that’s sort of the
conceptualization of society—a benevolent element and a malevolent
element, say. And then there’s (3) the introduction of the other
causal factor, and it’s personified in the form of the Blue Fairy.
The Blue Fairy is a manifestation of Mother Nature, and she animates
Pinocchio.
So Gepetto creates him, and then sets up a wish for his independence,
and then Nature appears in the guise of the Blue Fairy and grants
that wish. So you have culture and nature conspiring to produce a
puppet that could in fact disentangle itself from its strings. But
the movie insists—and it does this on profound mythological
grounds—that the puppet itself has a causal role to play in its
own—what would you call it—in its own capacity to transcend the
deterministic chains, the deterministic processes which have given
rise to it, that also enslave it.”
S: “Un-hum.”
J: “You know in all profound narratives, I would say, and this is
part of the way that they differ from the scientific account, there’s
always a third element. There’s always the autonomous individual,
who is in some sense, you know, lifting himself up by his own
bootstraps.
And I don’t think it is a problem that science in unable to account
for, but it’s a very big problem for scientists who are unable to
account for that, denying it exists, because they can’t explain it.
That becomes extraordinarily dangerous.”
S: “Right, yes, once you stop looking, you stop trying, right. Then
you’re left with an impoverished account. So in a way, there’s a
kind of hubris built into the skepticism that says I think I know
this is a problem that we just can’t solve, so I’m not going to
try anymore.”
J: “Yes, well there’s a performative contradiction as well, which
is much more worth pointing out. Because, on one hand, the scientist
might well claim, ‘As far as I am concerned from an epistemological
perspective, the only two causal forces are nature and culture.
But the I’ll go about my actions in the normative world, as an
existential being, acting in the world, and I will swallow
whole-heartedly the proposition that each individual is responsible
for his own actions—because that’s how I constantly interact with
everyone in the world. And I get very irritated if they violate this
principle.”
S: “Yes, right. So how you live with your skepticism or relativism
in a way that doesn’t ensnare your intensions and
contradictions—that’s a project itself.”
J: “Well, it does seem to me I think it’s reasonable to point out
that it’s not possible to find a person who acts as if he or
anyone else is biologically or culturally determined. We just don’t
behave that way in the real world.”
My response: Jordan provides strong empirical support for free will,
that people interact as if all have free will, so it is likely that
they do.
J: “We act as if we are responsible for our own actions, and the
consequences of those actions.”
S: “Right, then we have a tension between what our intellectual
theories are telling us and what our kind of empirical data is
telling us. We don’t have any way to put those two together, and
then what you as an individual do as a response to that tension
between theory and practice—that’ a whole other can of things to
explore.”
J: “right.”
S: “But to back up to our discussion about power. It’s
interesting the way our discussion up to that point integrates three
things: (1)We started talking about truths, and then we started
talking about goals and normative ends and ideals, and then (3) we
talk about power.
So there we got the big three: Truth, Ideals and Power. Our
discussion about Truth took us into epistemological issues in
philosophy; our discussion about Ideals takes us into ethics and
meta-ethical issues and also into philosophy. And our discussion of
Power takes us into issues about human nature.
All of which traditionally comprise a branch of philosophy and its
sub-disciplines so we already have a theory of epistemology, a theory
of human nature, a theory of ethics—and we can sometimes try to
integrate those.
And postmodernism is going to be an integration of certain views that
develop into philosophical traditions in all three of those areas.
So maybe one way to put it is this: If you contrast it to kind of
a—again, taking Enlightenment as our touchstone—I think we are
both fans of the Enlightenment—we say: All right, we’re fine with
power. Knowledge is power, and we want to empower the individual. We
want to eliminate slavery and empower people. We want to eliminate
old-fashioned sexism and empower women.
So power is (Ed Says: Stephen is referring to something like my
concept of the egoistic individual wielding the positive power of
powerfulness.).”
J: “Yes, we actually want to remove arbitrary and unnecessary
impediments to the expression of power, of proper power.”
S: “That’s right. So there are illegitimate uses of power that
are stopping and disempowering people. So it’s the double-edged
sword. And as long as power is properly directed or properly located,
then we are confident that, by and large, people individually and
socially will use their power to put together useful lives, build
successful economies and societies and so forth.
So it’s actually a very optimistic overall assessment about power
(Ed Says: I am not as optimistic that people will use personal or
social power well, though they can and must,). But power is then
structured as a means to an end. We want to empower people
cognitively—teach them how to read, teach them how to think, so
that they themselves can understand the truth and discover new
truths.
So power leads to truth. But we can also the want people to be free
to act on the basis of their power because then we think that if
people are respected as individual agents, they’re going to be
happier, so they will achieve good goals, and they will mutually work
out together fair agreements and deals—a kind of justice right.
Society will get better and better, and so forth. So power is in the
service of just social relations and power is in the service of the
good.”
J: “Yes, so now that’s a great justification say, for the
Enlightenment viewpoint. And it seems I don't want to stop you from
pursuing that. But it also seems to me that the degree that that’s
true, a valid description of the Enlightenment aims, and to the
degree that that has actually been manifested, that it’s perhaps
unwise of us to allow our Marxist or our Nietzschean presuppositions
to take too careless a swing at that foundation, given that it is
actually.”
S: “Absolutely, right. And that’s why the Enlightenment
articulation: Power is good if its in the service of truth, or Power
is good if it’s in the service of justice, then we’re fine. And
we’re optimistic enough about human beings, cognitively and
morally, that we think that empowering them, giving them lots of
freedoms, is going to increase the net stock of truth, and it’s
going to increase the net stock of justice.
So that entire Enlightenment package is what the
Counter-Enlightenment attacks.”
My response: Stephen might well agree that the Enlightenment or
modernism are synonymous, and that the Neo-Counter-Enlightenment is
synonymous with postmodernism or cultural Marxism.
Stephen is also correctly laying out the case that modernists
(individualists wielding good power, the power of powerfulness)
propose this good power model as emanating from a human nature using
power for good, with an egoistic ethical framework, and with a
realist epistemology optimistic about using good power to discover
and unpack ultimate truth.
The postmodernists deterministic view of human nature is expressed by
their evil power model, the power of powerlessness, with a normative
model of altruism-collectivism, with a skeptical, subjective
epistemology denying that objective truth is realizable effably, or
that it even exists.
S: “It attacks very fundamentally so that by the time we get two or
three generations later—to the generations of Marx and Nietzsche—it
has been hollowed out. Soon, on the epistemological side, we don’t
believe that there is such a thing as truth anymore. So it’s not
the case that power is in the search of truth because we don’t
believe humans are capable of getting any sort of objective truth
anymore.”
My response: If modernism was the unique, exceptional period of human
history and progress, in which increasingly moderate, rational,
liberated, self-esteeming, egoistic, empowered individuals wield the
power of powerfulness to increase truth and justice in a healthy
society, then the personal and collective wielding of power, in the
modernist epoch, was good more than not.
On the other hand, postmodernism and its thinkers with their
subjective, anti-realist, noncognitivist, skeptical and nihilistic
epistemology, disbelieve in and work feverishly to convince the
masses that modernism with its emphasis on objective truth and living
a just life in a just society are empty narratives promulgated by
corrupt, unjust elites, so the power model they will wield (To live
is to wield power, or the ontological force or action to do things in
the world.) is the power of powerlessness, so we will end up living
in dystopians hells, totalitarian theocracy, totalitarian socialism
or totalitarian fascism.
S: “So we’re just left with power. And also on the normative side
we don’t believe in justice anymore. We don’t believe that any
sort of normative or ethical ideals can be objectively grounded. And
so once again, maybe we’re left with subjective desires and so
forth, but we’re just left again with power. So in the service of
Truth, power is in the service of justice—that goes away. All we
are left with is power.”
J: “Okay, so then we could mount a psychoanalytic critique of that
set of objections. Because I could say, okay, here’s some reasons.
Let’s assume you are doing something easy and simple instead of
complicated and difficult with your objections.
And so here’s the simple and easy explanation. You want to dispense
with the idea of justice and truth because that lightens your
existential load. Now that there’s nothing difficult and noble that
you have to strive for, and you want to reduce everything to power
because that justifies your use of power in pursuit of those
immediate goals that you no longer even have to justify because you
don’t have to make reference to any standard of say justice and
truth.
And so I would say: That’s a deep, impulsive and resentful nihilism
that’s manifested itself as a glorious intellectual critique. Now I
understand as well that there is the history of genuine intellectual
critique that you’ve been laying out which is not trivial—but
those things have to be differentiated, you know.
It’s certainly not reasonable either for those who claim that all
there is is power, that they are not themselves motivated equally by
that power.”
S: Sure. So, in a way, all right, what you can always say, in effect,
is that philosophy is autobiographical. In many cases philosophers
will put their pronouncements in third-person form, or in generalized
form, but if you always put it down to third-person formulations, it
can be profoundly self-revelatory. So if you say for example human
beings are scum—there you have some sort of pessimistic assessment
of the human condition.
Well, built into that then is the idea that is the idea that I, if I
first-personalize it, that I am scum. What you’re really doing is a
first person confession. And it’s always an illegitimate move to
exempt your self from the general principle.”
My response: I generalize that people are mostly but are not entirely
sinful, but I also presuppose that I am as weak and sinful as anyone
else, that becoming virtuous is an exerted effort of one’s will to
field a good will, to be a loving person of good character, exemplary
behavior, and as near an impeccable reputation as possible.
J: “Right.”
S: “Or everything is just power relations and people imposing their
agendas on other people. Then what you’re saying is, well, my
fundamental commitment is power, and I just want to impose my agenda
on other people.
So I think you are right—that it can go both ways. It can of course
be that you have people, who, for whatever reason, have a
predisposition to nihilistic, amoral power-seeking, and, when they
become adults and intellectual, they latch onto theories that indulge
them, that enable them to rationalize their predispositions. And so
in a lot of cases, yes, a lot of postmodernism, in some of of its
manifestations, is disingenuous, in that form.
People don’t necessarily buy into the postmodern philosophical
framework, but rather, in kind of pragmatic form, postmodernism as a
set of tools for them is to advance their own personal and social
agendas, whatever those happen to be.”
J: “Okay, so let’s switch a little bit. Let’s switch over into
that a little bit. I’ve found our discussion extremely useful on
the philosophical end, but now I would like to make it a bit more
personal if you don’t mind. You’ve written this book, Explaining
Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucalt, and
it’s a fairly punchy critique of postmodernism and its alliance
with Neo-Marxism.
And you’ve done a careful job of laying out the historical
development of both of those movements and their alliance. What was
your motivation for doing that, and what have you experienced as a
consequence (1) of writing the book and (2) as a consequence of being
a professor who’s in the midst of an academic society, that is
basically run on postmodernist principles?”
S: “Yes, that’s a good trio of questions there. Well, my
motivations for writing the book were: one, as an intellectual
exercise: here was a movement that was complex, many philosophical
and cultural strands coming together, and I enjoy intellectual
history very much.
So it was a pleasure for me to read back into the histories and to
tease out all the lines of development, and how things were packaged
so that the postmodern synthesis (as it came together in the second
third of the 20th century) came into being.
As a purely intellectual, historical enterprise, I found that
fulfilling. Partly also this is the 1990s, late 1990s, it’s the end
of the Cold War. One of the things I had done not professionally but
just out of personal interest—was to read a lot of political
philosophy, read lots about the Cold War, and the intellectual
developments—and call it political developments that had gone on
there.
So I had a very good, I’d say, an amateur working knowledge, before
I started researching the book, about the history of Marxism and a
history of the Cold War geo-politics. And sort of one of the big
questions on everyone’s mind of course in the late 1990s with the
fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War is: So what’s
the new geo-political alignment going to be? Then from my academic
position, the big question inside the intellectual world is: since
far-left politics had been so prominent and that for a generation,
intellectuals inside the academic world had largely given the benefit
of the doubt to far-left experiments—even going out of their way to
be fellow travelers, and so forth, that by the time you get to the
end of the Cold War, basically everyone, except for a few true
believers is rethinking.
So what does this mean for—not necessarily left-politics—more
broadly, but certainly, far-left politics? As so even the
far-leftists of the leftists are recognizing that they’re going to
have to come up with some new strategy in order to remain
intellectually respectable, and some sort of new strategy in order to
become culturally and politically feasible.
So I did have kind of a cultural/political interest in what the
thinking was on the far left about what they’re going to do now
that the Soviet Union has collapsed, and the whole world is shifting
towards market liberalism or some sort of third way centrism.”
J: “Yeah, now that all the corpses have floated up on the beach, so
to speak.”
S: “Right, yes. So you have a huge then amount of empirical data
that you have to confront. And now, I think this is going to be part
of the postmodern package but there’s a lot of denial of the
relevance of empiricism, there’s a lot of denial of logic and
social scientific statistical methods of aggregating that data, and
reaching normative conclusions on the basis of that.
So we can understand the temptation on the part of a lot of people to
find psychological devices that will enable them to deny the Gulag
and the various other horrible things by the time of the 90s.”
J: “Right. When the facts even as you on the left would have
construe them, are stacking up viciously in contradiction to your
theory, it’s time to mount and all-out assault on what constitutes
a fact.”
S: “Okay, that’s one strategy, and that’s again one of the
sub-strategies I think postmodernists will learn to use. So if you
have philosophers and social scientist, and people who are up to
speed in their epistemology, who are telling you, well, you know,
there are just different narratives that are out there, and there are
no such things as objective facts, and logic does not necessarily
point us in one direction: there are poly-logics or multiple
frameworks.”
My response: I believe in objective facts that are mostly true or
certainly true with probable success, certain enough to make
normative judgments, based on them, and they do point us in one
direction most of the time; I refute postmodernists.
S: “Then if you have one framework which says, No. There are
objective facts and the logic is all against your version of
political idealism, then it’s going to be very tempting for you to
say, well, I can just dismiss that as one narrative way of
constructing the historical facts. I can come up with a different
narrative that softens or denies altogether.
And certainly some of the bad faith postmodernist do go down that
road very much. So in part that was my motivation for writing the
book. And in part I did feel that I was in a good position
intellectually to do so because my Ph. D. work had been in logic,
philosophy of science and epistemology, so I was up to speed on the
history of philosophy from the modern world on through the way things
were in the 80s and early 90s.
So I was reading the same people that Rorty had. I have to say I
learned an enormous amount from reading Richard Rorty.”
My response: We can and should study and learn from our opponents; it
makes us sharper, deeper thinkers.
S: “He’s first-rate even though I end up disagreeing
fundamentally with him about everything. Foucault’s Ph. D. D. also
was in philosophy. He also had a Ph. D. in psychology.
Derrida—another philosophy Ph. D. Lyotard—another philosophy Ph.
D.
So I am not necessarily putting myself on the same stature
intellectually but all of us, so to speak, are first-rate educated in
epistemology. So I know where they are coming from and where all of
that is going.
At the same time my undergraduate and master’s degree at Guelph
(just down the road from you) in the history of philosophy. So I had
a long standing passion for how arguments and movements develop over
time.
I was in a good position to see how postmodernism had evolved out of
various earlier movements that had developed over time—and I am
enough of a political animal to be interested in political
philosophy. And I believe that abstract political theory, when it
gets put into practice, makes life-and-death practical differences.
So the stakes are high, so I was motivated to pull it all together in
postmodernism. So I wrote the book.
Now, yes, it has affected me personally in academic life. Well. Let
me see. In one way, I think I was fortunate that I had tenure by the
time the book was published, and my university by and large is a
tolerant place. We have some issues there, but by and large my
colleagues are reasonable, decent people, and at least I was able to
get tenure on the strength of my teaching abilities and my
publications.
As so it wasn’t that I was going to lose my job over this. But of
course there is blowback. I did have difficulty getting the book
published in the first place. Actually I finished writing the book by
the year 2000. I had taken a sabbatical from 1999-2000 and wrote the
book then, but I was not able to get the book published until 2004,
and the reason for that was a number of desk rejections. You know the
editor just sends a form letter back. I got a few of those. But more
seriously, what happened three times, possibly four times, I don’t
exactly remember now, was it would get past the editor at the press,
and then it would be sent out to two or three reviewers—and in each
case what happened, I would get split and polarized reviews.
One would come back and say, This is really a good book, it’s a
good argument, it’s a fresh argument. I don’t necessarily agree
with all of it, but this really ought to be out there as a book. And
then the other review on the other side would be equally savaging:
This is a terrible book. He doesn’t know his history of philosophy.
He butchered this, that and the other thing, and I strongly recommend
that you don’t publish this book.
And then almost always in that situation the editor just says no. So
it wasn’t until late 2003, early 2004 that Scholarly Publishing,
which was then a small press working out of Arizona, took the book
on, and I’m happy to say that after it was published, it has been
in print ever since.”
J: “Yes, that’s remarkable. That’s remarkable. Yes, so I’m
very happy about that. For any book, let alone an academic book.”
S: “Yes, and then multiple translations and those continue so I am
happy about that. Now, I’d say the scholarly responses have been
from moderate liberals: so kind of traditional, don’t necessarily
want to use the word traditional, but from rational, naturalistic,
liberal thinkers, conservatives and libertarians, the reviews have
all been strong and strongly positive.
But I’ve not received any formal reviews from any of the postmodern
or far left journals, so I’m not sure what that means, but there
is, at least at some level, an unwillingness to engage.”
My response: Because Stephen Hicks is a follower of Ayn Rand, likely
the unwillingness to engage his fine work here on postmodernism, is
an undeserved, petty, ideological snub from other professional
thinkers, from the philosophical establishment, hostile to Ayn Rand
and professors who support her. It could be that Peterson is the one
that made Hick famous. Peterson certainly helped Hick’s career
advancement.
If you do a browser search as to who alerted the West to the arrival
of postmodernism as a movement since the late 1990s, there is no
mention of Stephen Hicks whatsoever, because in part he may not be
that well known outside of Randian circles of thought, or because
orthodox thinkers in woke, left academia have blacklisted Hicks.
J: “Well, it might be a sign of respect.”
My response: Jordan seems to be politely sidestepping the fact Hicks
the Randian has been blacklisted by tendentious, woke, Leftists
professors and intellectuals.
S: “Well, there is one sign of respect that was out, and that is
that every, I’d say once a year or so, probably a dozen times since
the book has been published, I’ve been asked by the editor of a
postmodern or close fell-traveler critical theory type of journal, to
be a second reviewer on one of their articles. So I’m in their
Rolodex so to speak—to use the old-fashioned label—when they are
looking for someone who is likely to give an objective but critical
perspective on some article that’s been submitted to the journal.
Once in awhile my name floats up and they’ll send it out to me, so
I’ll do the standard thing of reading it, and giving my
professional opinion of it. So I think they are aware of me but there
hasn’t really been any direct intellectual engagement, which is
kind of sad.”
My response: It is sad because Hicks is a fine thinker and
underrated.
J: “Right. Yes. So now when you set yourself up to write a book,
were you thinking of writing a critique of postmodernism or were you
thinking of conducting an exploration of postmodernism?
S: “Well, right now I’m working on the critique. The first book
ends—I don’t want to say abruptly, but it does end with the door
open to saying: How do we respond to this dead-end of
Counter-Enlightenment in postmodernism?”
My response: Hicks has never written the anticipated response to
postmodernism, an objective Neo-Modernism account to replace
postmodernism, offered for public consumption.
S: “So we’re at a point culturally where the meaning of
postmodernism has now infected the Academy and you see problems
there, but it has also left the Academy, and so thoughtful people
outside the Academy are seeing the results. And so the big question
is: What do we do next?
So I’m actively working on the sequel to Explaining Postmodernism
now. And I did go back and forth on writing it. My first purpose was
to write a straight diagnosis and intellectual history of
postmodernism, and that’s where I end up leaving it.
Because in one sense, this was a bit artificial, but I really like
200 page books. It’s long enough for you to get into a subject
deeply enough, and to make a good, pointed, integrated argument and
then stop. And so I realized that if I wrote the sequel then, it
would be a 400 page book, and I thought it was more important to get
this self-contained, intellectual history of postmodernism out there.
So I brought things to I think a logical conclusion where I ended the
book, and now I’m working on the next.”
J: “What is the next book called?”
S: “The working title---it changes every few months or so—sometimes
I think about, The Fate Of the Enlightenment, or something to do with
Neo-Enlightenment, or—it won’t be this—but Post-Postmodernism
or After Postmodernism—something like that.”
J: “Okay, we’re struggling with terms as well as with people I’ve
been talking with about such things.”
S: “So it’s a very hard thing to do because as we have seen
philosophically, postmodernism is multi-dimensional, it’s a
metaphysical critique, it’s a normative critique, it’s a
political critique, it’s an epistemological critique, it’s an
epistemological set of views.
And so the alternative then, and so the alternative then has be
integrated philosophically. There has to be an entire package (Ed
says: Could Mavellonialism serve as this alternative,
multi-dimensional philosophical package?).
So what label is going to capture all of that and at the same time
make a connection to postmodernism? And also, I’m basically an
optimistic, positive guy, so I want something that has a positive.”
J: “Yes, illuminates the pathway forward.”
S: “Yes, that’s right, yes, making the world a better place.”
J: “Right, exactly, exactly. So look, I think and hour-and-a-half
interview is approximately the equivalent of a 200 page book.”
S: “So, we’re done/”
J: “Why don’t we end with that, and what I would like to propose
is that we have another discussion in a couple of months about what
you’re thinking about with regards to what you’re writing now?”
S: “So, like we’ve covered the intellectual territory; we’ve
covered the historical territory, and done a reasonably good job I
think both justifying postmodernism in this discussion and also
pointing out its pitfalls and dangers.”
J: “Sure, yes. We haven’t outlined much for an alternative vision
except marking tangential reference to the potency of individual
capacity but that would seem to be reasonable grounds for the next
discussion so.”
S: “What else would be worth the next time we chat, talking about
are the current, cultural war issues. You know, one of the things,
I’m very interested in is young people in particular who are in the
front lines in universities, so to speak, and they’re surrounded
and bewildered and angry and in some cases intimidated by all of this
microaggressions and so forth, and in some case the indoctrination
they are getting.”
J: “But I’m actually kind of glad that we didn’t talk about the
more political end of it today because it enabled us to have a
conversation that was almost entirely philosophical in nature, and I
think that is the right level of analysis, because the battle that’s
occurring in our culture is actually occurring at a philosophical
level. I mean, there’s other levels as well, but that’s even more
important than the political level as far as I am concerned.”
My response: Jordan is right: the cultural and political battle flow
out of philosophical premises, so meta-philosophically is where the
battles of ideas, which bleed out into the society, is to be waged.
S: “Well-said. I agree one-hundred percent. Nicely put.”
J: “All right, it was a pleasure speaking with you—it was very
much worth while.”
S: “Me too: thank you very much.”
J: “You have a remarkable capacity for tracking the content of
conversations and keeping them on point, so that’s quite amazing to
see, because we did branch out in a lot of different directions more
or less simultaneously, and it was quite helpful in keeping the
conversation on track, that you could so rapidly organize. You know
it was almost like you were putting a paragraph structure in the
conversation as it occurred, so that was something that was really
interesting to see.
So anyways, it was a pleasure meeting you, and thanks very much for
talking with me. I’ll obviously put a line.”
S: “It is my pleasure.”
J: “I’ve been recommending your book like.”
S: “My pleasure. Much respect for the work you’re doing. Thanks
for having me on your show, and will be happy to talk again.”
J: “Great, good. We will set that up.”
