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.”
No comments:
Post a Comment