Postmodern Psychoses

Here's how we built our "culture of meaninglessness."

Here’s a question I used to ponder as a philosophy graduate student at Cornell in the early 2000s: Why was materialism (or “physicalism,” as they more often called it) still the mainstream view? Materialism is a deeply impoverished metaphysical position; I think it’s fairly easy, in fact, to appreciate that. And these were very brainy people. What explained their attachment to such a deeply deficient view?

I now work among political conservatives, so I’m aware that this question would be uninteresting to most of them. What’s to explain? University professors are blinkered, narrow-minded, and obtuse in all sorts of ways. Don’t we all know that the entire Academy is little more than a rank, progressive-dogma swamp?

Well, I’m still perplexed. And like a good analytic philosophy student, I’m prepared to defend my perplexity.

Here’s the first thing that would perhaps surprise the jaded conservative: physicalism really wasn’t an “unshakable dogma” in this setting. Academic philosophers were aware of other positions, and some even adopted them. That was not unacceptable, merely eccentric. To be a dualist or an Aristotelian was to have an accent. Physicalism was simply the standard lingo.

Unquestionably, it had pervaded many of the philosophical sub-disciplines I encountered. My philosophy of mind class mainly wrestled with the problem of how physical brains could somehow give rise to consciousness and human experience. Metaethics was about making moral relativism work somehow. These philosophers (again, very brainy!) appreciated that the task they had set themselves was quite hard. They acknowledged the warts. There were even iconoclasts like John Searle or J. L. Mackie who wrote deeply cutting critiques explaining the deep problems with physicalism, and we read them. And then we went back to puzzling. It was all very… puzzling.

I would not have been so perplexed if other metaphysical views had been met with blistering scorn. If the whole thing had felt like a head-in-sand groupthink exercise, I could at least have read the room with ease. But it didn’t feel like that. It felt more like hanging out in a ramshackle house with genial people who cheerfully acknowledged that the roof was leaking, the walls crumbling, the floorboards rotting away—and look! Right over there is a nicer, cozier house with space for all of us! But nah, let’s just stay where we are. Hey, grab that bucket, there’s another leak over there.

It’s been years now since I was enmeshed in that world, but I still muse on it sometimes. One factor, perhaps surprising to the uninitiated: Analytic philosophers are avid puzzlers. They thrill to intellectual challenges the way some people love crosswords or jigsaws. Thus, they do have a certain appreciation for the contrarian, the out-on-a-limb radical, the dogged defender of a minority view. It’s fun to have a few of those around. Those disagreements tend, however, to be explored purely at the level of the logic puzzle. To extend my analogy, analytic philosophers are a bit like people who, yes, are sitting in a very tumbledown house, but they don’t much mind the leaky roof or rotting floorboards because home repair is their favorite thing. They’d get bored without something to patch.

That’s a quirk of the academic-philosophy world. But I think there’s a further point here that applies to the modern world more generally. We’re used to fragmentation. We’re habituated to meaninglessness. We can play in the sandbox of materialism because we’ve ginned up some copes that make it feel bearable. In the day-to-day, those copes can prevent people from spiraling into total apathy and despair. Usually. Until they don’t.

I think postmodernism can be fruitfully understood in that light. It’s a kind of philosophical “cope” that moved into the meaning vacuum created by materialism, spawning its own lingo and style of discourse, giving people causes and a sense of righteousness. It should be noted that postmodernism wasn’t particularly popular in the analytic circles where I was trained. Not on the level of theory, at least. But I think the modern mind is so habituated to it that it can serve as a kind of psychological buffer even for very smart people who’ve never bothered much with the theory. They reflexively thought like postmodernists when reading Newsweek or watching the BBC, whether or not they formally bought into it.

Unfortunately, postmodernism has no real capacity to build a thriving society. It exists to tear down and destroy, dissolving all that is fixed or familiar. As critics, postmodernists can at times be quite brilliant. But postmodernism is a kind of universal solvent: there’s no natural limit to its destructive energies. And nothing is more inimical to it than nature, tradition, or ordered liberty.

Postmodernism has roots in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, both genius-level thinkers who were keenly attentive to the chasm at the heart of modern societies. The erosion of the ancient and medieval worldviews had created a kind of meaning-vacuum. After rejecting all the original sources of normativity or teleology, modern people struggle to justify any end, purpose, or moral judgment. Both Nietzsche and Heidegger, in their different ways, wanted to address the problem through what we might call “heroic existential reassertion.” (It’s entirely unsurprising that fascists love both, though that’s not the only possible application for the work of these genuinely brilliant men.) The details of those recommendations need not concern us here. What matters for the present is that they exposed the sheer depth of the abyss. Strip away the ancient teleology, and modern man is left without a handhold: we can’t explain why anything is worth doing. Nothing intrinsically matters anymore. Nihilism is simply the modern condition.

We don’t normally think of those men as postmodernists, but they described the hole that postmodernism moved to fill. Instead of embracing Nietzsche’s will to power or Heidegger’s “resoluteness” (but perhaps those were influences after all?), the postmodernists took a more straightforward approach. They threw out the rulebook. Rejecting the time-honored demand to treat philosophy as the reason-driven pursuit of truth, they shifted their focus to narrative.

In cutting themselves free from the constraints of reason and reality, the postmodernists achieved a terrible liberation. Understanding reality was no longer the goal; indeed, even the desire for that was intrinsically suspect, since “reason” and “reality” were now viewed in narrative terms as “weapons of the oppressor.” Postmodernism, in the words of French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, embraced a sweeping “incredulity towards metanarratives.” Truth claims are really just bids for power. Language builds reality instead of describing it. The world is ours to create; anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to dominate or steal from you.

Both Nietzsche and Heidegger (masters of metanarrative!) provided the inspiration for this movement. Karl Marx was another titanic influence. But later postmodernists turned these power-and-language games into a full body of theory, a full-blown conceptual machinery, relentlessly seeking to remake the world. Much ugly fruit has come from this, but it’s important to understand that postmodernists were able to have this impact in part because the theory is not entirely without value. It’s actually quite true that language shapes our world in some very nuanced ways. That truth claims are often used to solidify status or pursue power. “Metanarratives” do in fact move whole societies in very consequential ways, and postmodernism threw a bright light on some of those realties.

Finally, postmodernism resonated in part because it made sense of another feature of modernity that’s already been discussed here at Christendom Reborn. Human nature turns out to be more complex in certain ways than many historical societies have recognized. As the human race became richer and better educated, we came to appreciate just how rarified a human society can be. And, we came to understand that many of the assumptions of the ancient and medieval worlds, about bloodline, race, sex, and so on, are far less grounded in “nature” than most societies have believed. Postmodernism was well equipped to furnish explanations for those mistakes.

There’s just one problem. The world is not ours to create. Reality isn’t endlessly malleable. And the rejection of reason and truth leaves us utterly vulnerable to manipulation, domination, and endless civic strife. In the end, postmodernism has no real tools for building. It dangles a tantalizing promise that new worlds may be ours to create, but in reality its activity is relentlessly oriented around deconstruction. Breaking down traditions. Upending established order. Persuading people not to believe their lying eyes, because language and power! Postmodernism’s goals are utopian, but its tools are overwhelmingly destructive. It promises fulfillment but delivers crippling victim complexes. Think now about the host of unhinged causes that have run roughshod across our political landscape in recent years. Is there a single one that isn’t deeply shaped by postmodernism?

Whether we’re looking at postcolonialism, Third Worldism, feminism, Critical Race Theory, the new socialism, or any of the right-wing variants that now compete for air time in our public square, postmodern terms and patterns of thought are now ubiquitous in our public life. They’re hard to refute, because on the one hand they aren’t always wrong (power and language are indeed a big part of the world), but at the same time, insofar as postmodernism is the main driving engine, these movements intrinsically lack the capacity to be right. Postmodernism rejects the demand to conform itself to reason and truth. It’s up-front about its refusal to “play fair.” There’s no way to critique it, and no workable method for finding common ground. By asserting that power and language are everything in life, postmodernists have to a certain extent made that true.

Of course, it’s not entirely true. The universe is not really a blank slate for human narrative, and reality always bats last. Recovery is possible, but diagnosis is an important first step. Materialism and postmodernism have between them created a kind of “culture of meaninglessness” in which people are actively habituated in reductive and anti-rational patterns of thought. Materialism furnishes a metaphysical foundation for modern thought, while postmodernism supplies a framework for addressing questions of value. But these are both deeply flawed frameworks, whose defects reinforce one another, ultimately sowing emptiness, despair, and endless civil discord.

There are better options. One has to begin by wanting them. Happily, many people do, and even in the world of philosophy there are signs of hope. I’ll pick up there next week, which will be dedicated to the theme: The Aristotelians Strike Back.