By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, August 13, 2025
The Friday before last I wrote, “I’m sorry about knocking
off your side mirror. Here is my phone number [redacted]. I will be happy to
pay for the damages.—Steve Hayes.”
But my personal notes aren’t relevant right now.
I also wrote
in the G-File: “What I find remarkable—hence my penchant for
remarking upon it—is how postmodern Trump is. What I mean by that is
postmodernism is shot through with a confusion of words and things and a
sometimes-invincible conviction that feelings determine authentic truth.”
I continued, but you can read it for yourself. I also
mentioned this point about Donald Trump’s post-modernism on The
Dispatch Podcast last week. I don’t know if I inspired Kevin
Williamson to pick up the baton, but he did in this wonderful
piece on the right’s postmodernism problem.
I share Kevin’s nostalgia for the conservative pastime of
whacking postmodernism. I did quite a bit of it myself,
in part because I needed to do something with what I learned in college. If I
may quote myself again (And, really, who can stop me? You, Garvey? You, Hayes? You, Lieutenant Whine-berg?) I
wrote this in 2002:
The greatest exposé of postmodern
asininity appeared, in 1996, in the pages of a respected postmodern magazine
called Social Text. The editors of Social Text, as part of their
long campaign against facts-without-quotation-marks, dedicated an entire issue
to the problem of “science.” For obvious reasons, PoMos hate science more than
dogs hate vacuum cleaners, and they bark at it about as much. You see, scientists
work on precisely the opposite assumptions as PoMos; they actually think that
facts exist outside of clever word games. You can say all you like that physics
is phallocentric, but it’s not going to change the rules of thermodynamics.
This really pisses off PoMos, because scientists keep making really cool
gadgets that work while, to date, Duke’s English department hasn’t been able to
make an airplane run on metaphors or to illuminate a football stadium with the
adverbs from James Joyce’s Dubliners.
I went on to discuss the “Social Text Controversy”
or “Sokal Hoax.” In short: A physicist named Alan Sokal submitted a paper to Social
Text titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative
Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” The money conclusion: “physical ‘reality,’ no
less than social ‘reality,’ is at bottom a social and linguistic construct.”
The journal published it. Then, Sokal revealed it was a
put-on.
(I’d call it an “eminence front” in homage to Pete
Townshend, but “eminence front” isn’t a real phrase, and the truth is whenever
I hear “it’s a put-on” that song comes to mind, and I have a weird compulsion
to infect people with my ear worms.)
One of the fun things about the ensuing controversy was
how some defenders of Social Text insisted that it didn’t matter if
Sokal’s essay was untrue. What is truth, anyway?
Others were angry at Sokal’s ethical lapse. Stanley Fish,
easily the best writer of the postmodern crowd, wrote a brilliant, and almost
persuasive, critique
of Sokal’s prank for the New York Times. He claimed that Sokal
completely misunderstood what postmodern scholars of the history of science are
up to. I highly recommend it, if only for the skill of the effort.
But here’s the bit I want to talk about. Fish wrote:
When Professor Sokal declares [in
an essay for Lingua Franca revealing the stunt] that ‘theorizing about ‘the
social construction of reality’’won’t help us find an effective treatment for
AIDS,’ he is at once right and wrong. He is right that sociologists will never
do the job assigned properly to scientists. He is wrong to imply that the
failure of the sociology of science to do something it never set out to do is a
mark against it.
My point is finally a simple one: A
research project that takes the practice of science as an object of study is
not a threat to that practice because, committed as it is to its own goals and
protocols, it doesn’t reach into, and therefore doesn’t pose a danger to, the
goals and protocols it studies. Just as the criteria of an enterprise will be
internal to its own history, so will the threat to its integrity be internal,
posed not by presumptuous outsiders but by insiders who decide not to play by
the rules or to put the rules in the service of a devious purpose.
In other words, don’t pick on the postmodernists because
postmodernists aren’t coming for science, you ninny. I wasn’t persuaded then,
but I thought it was a plausible and interesting defense of the PoMo project.
Nearly three decades later, it’s just obviously false.
Forget words like “postmodern,” “deconstruction,” and all
of those terms that come with a pack of Gauloises cigarettes. The
broader project of “decentering” traditional narratives and claiming that
objective truths are merely social constructs or dominating paradigms, blah
blah blah, has had remarkable success outside its lane. This is obviously true
in the humanities. But it’s also true in the sciences.
Yesterday I recorded an episode of The Remnant with
Carole Hooven, formerly a professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard (and
now, among other things, a colleague at AEI). Hooven is a very controversial
figure because she insists that science recognizes male and female as
biological facts, at least in mammals and other relevant organisms, including,
you know, humans.
Now, I’m going to level with you. I wrote a whole bunch
of stuff on this topic but, just this moment, I’ve decided to put it to one
side until the Hooven episode drops. So, consider that a teaser both for the
podcast and for a future “news”letter.
PoMos for science.
Instead, I want to make a point that occurred to me while
talking to Hooven and after reading Kevin’s piece.
I don’t think it’s exactly true that postmodernism, and related movements, are
“anti-science” or “anti-truth” in the way we on the right talked about it a few
decades ago. And I don’t think the postmodern new right is quite as
anti-science and anti-truth in the way that many critics (including me)
sometimes suggest.
This will require some table-setting.
Some readers may recall that I have an extremely nerdy
antipathy
for philosophical pragmatism. After existentialism and before postmodernism,
pragmatism was the new hotness in intellectual circles. The term was coined by
Charles Sanders Peirce, but he abandoned the label once William James and John
Dewey got their hands on it. For James, Dewey, and a host of Progressive Era
intellectuals, pragmatism was a way to dethrone capital T truth, too. Very,
very, briefly: Truth was whatever works. If believing something was true had
“cash value,” in James’ famous phrase, then that’s good enough. What determined
whether something was true was how much you wanted it to be true. If you
had enough of what James called “the will to believe,” that was good enough.
The largely forgotten Italian pragmatist philosopher Giovanni Papini—admired by
James and the Italian fascists—explained
that pragmatism is “less a philosophy than a method for doing without
philosophy.”
This points to what I consider the real agenda of
pragmatism: to tear down other notions of metaphysical truth the
pragmatists didn’t like or found inconvenient. Whatever pragmatism was on the
page of a book or in a lecture hall, in the real world, it was used to clear
the field of philosophical competition.
This has long been my view of postmodernism, too. As I
wrote in Liberal Fascism:
In a seminar there may be important
distinctions to be made between, say, Foucault’s “enterprise of Unreason,”
Derrida’s tyrannical logocentrism, and Hitler’s “revolt against reason.” But
such distinctions rarely translate beyond ivy-covered walls—and they are
particularly meaningless to a movement that believes action is more important
than ideas. Deconstruction, existentialism, postmodernism, Pragmatism,
relativism: all of these ideas had the same purpose—to erode the iron chains of
tradition, dissolve the concrete foundations of truth, and firebomb the bunkers
where the defenders of the ancien régime still fought and persevered.
These were ideologies of the “movement.” The late Richard Rorty admitted as
much, conflating Nietzsche and Heidegger with James and Dewey as part of the
same grand project.
I still believe this. But what I think gets lost is that
this is a snapshot perspective. What I mean is that when we freeze a fluid
political movement—or really anything at all—at a specific moment in time, we
learn a lot, but we miss a lot, too. A snapshot of the Titanic leaving
port conveys a lot of information: what the ship looked like, its size, how
excited the passengers were, etc. But the story of the Titanic is
more like a film, with a beginning, middle, and rather famous end.
Some scholars of fascism, communism, and other illiberal
movements will often make a sharp distinction between such movements seeking
power and such movements in power. The Iranian Islamist
revolutionaries seeking power made common cause with Marxists and sucked up to
Western intellectuals—until they got into power. Then, they hung or exiled the
Marxists and told the Western intellectuals to stuff it. Fidel Castro as revolutionary
bandito said all sorts of stuff about democracy he abandoned once in power.
Take a snapshot of Castro charming Herbert Matthews in the Cuban hills, and
Castroism looks a lot like the Titanic leaving port. All of that talk about
Robespierre, Stalin, Mao, et al., “betraying the spirit of the revolution” is
really a lament that the pre-victory snapshot was not predictive of where the
revolution would lead.
I don’t want to rehearse all the ways in which the new
right has gone postmodern. But the mockery of “norms” as mere partisan tools of
oppression, the contempt for experts, the preference for beneficial headlines
over actual improvements on the ground, the assumption that any news that
reflects poorly on Trump must be fake, biased, or somehow rigged, the love of
conspiracy theories as monocausal explanations, are just a taste.
But here’s the thing: The great benefit of the new
right’s postmodern turn is that, save for a handful of postliberal
intellectuals, most of them are utterly devoid of the vocabulary of
postmodernism. They don’t know any of the tricks. Think about it. The MAGA
lingo about the system being rigged, the Deep State, wokeness, etc., is just a
more proletarian way of talking about institutional this and hegemonic that.
The argument is basically the same. “They” control stuff, and “they” get to
police my language.
This makes it much easier to see the new right’s
postmodern turn for what it is: a power grab. And that’s what all of these
-isms were: arguments for toppling those in power and replacing them with “our”
guys.
But that’s not all. What happens when the kinds of
revolutionary or radical intellectuals who like to argue against objective
truth or any kind of orthodoxy or tradition—the sorts of folks who claim that
“the system” is really some kind of conspiracy against the masses—win? Do they
keep speaking truth to power? Do they maintain their edgy skepticism of
metaphysical or historical certainty? Do they keep their minds open to the idea
that their preferred narratives are merely socially constructed fictions?
No. No, they don’t.
Once in power, the Jacobins, ayatollahs, Leninists,
Stalinists, Nazis, Maoists, et al become ruthless enforcers of
orthodoxy. This is not just true of classical revolutionary political
movements. When the postmodernists take over an English department, they lock
the door behind them. When the social justice types conquer a foundation or
charity, they become orthodoxy factories.
This is the point that popped into my head while talking
to Hooven. The people who claim that traditional medical or scientific
approaches are shot through with heteronormative biases and structures of white
supremacy aren’t so much anti-science as they are thirsty to have the power
that comes with getting to define what science says.
For most people, “science” is a shorthand for “truth” or
“the method of exploring what is real.” And they want the authority and
validation that comes with having science on their side. This, after all, is
why Marx insisted that his conspiracy theory about history and economics was in
fact “science.” Many of the same people who say they don’t believe the
scientists who claim there are only two sexes are perfectly happy to say
“follow the science” on climate issues. More to the point, what they want is to
be able to say “follow the science” on sex and gender, which is why they
constantly try to get the scientific
evidence to back up their
claims.
For all the talk about how Trump and Trumpists are “anti-truth,”
“post-truth”
or at war with facts—talk
I largely agree with—this commentary is all a snapshot. Trumpist PoMos are just
like all the PoMos who came before them. They don’t want to destroy the truth,
they want to define it.
This fact is really pretty obvious once you look for it.
Trump issues executive orders with titles like “Restoring
Truth and Sanity to American History” and “Defending
Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the
Federal Government.”
If “information”—true or false—makes him look good, then
it’s true. If it doesn’t, it’s “fake news.”
Among the postliberal eggheads, there’s a refreshing
honesty about this. Their indictment of the liberal regime is that it tolerates
too many definitions of the truth—metaphysical, political, religious—and they
want to enthrone their own one-size-fits-all orthodoxy.
And that’s the irony. The best and most defensible things
about postmodernism, but also pragmatism and many other radical -isms, are
already achieved by liberal democratic capitalism. The (republican) liberalism
of the Founders takes into account the small truths and fair points used by the
radicals to make their agendas sound defensible and reasonable. People do have
different understandings of the truth. Because human nature is flawed,
institutions and factions made up of humans will have flaws, too. Self-interest
and self-dealing can be a problem in every sphere of life, whether it’s in
business, education, religion, or politics.
Our system deals with these facts with a whole slew of
mechanisms and procedures like the rule of law, the Constitution, free speech,
free inquiry, freedom of religion, property rights, and checks and balances at
every layer of government. People have the right to be wrong. And people have
the right to pursue happiness as they define it, not how you define
it. The purpose of this system is to foster fruitful disagreement. This
disagreement plays itself out in elections, in the press, in myriad competing
experiments in living, worship, commerce, etc. I’ve been saying for decades now
that the single most fascist thing Americans say on a regular basis is “The
time for debate is over.” In America, there’s always time for a debate, even if
a decision needs to be made before it’s over.
There are metaphysical fundamentals, philosophical
guardrails, and traditional guideposts that bind, circumscribe, and define this
American experiment. Dig deep enough—or really just scratch the surface—and
you’ll find that laws against theft, murder, rape, discrimination, etc. have
long and strong theological, moral, and metaphysical underpinnings. Our system
is not “neutral” as the postliberals often claim, nor is it irredeemably
racist, sexist, or even capitalist, as the PoMos often insist.
But our system is free. Again, our freedom is not
absolute, nor should it be. Ordered liberty requires order. But it is freer
than many would like because freedom allows for the success of those we think
are wrong. And that’s why the war on truth—regardless of what flag it comes
under—is never really about destroying truth. It’s about gaining power in large
part by trying to claim a monopoly on the truth. Truth gets hurt in the
process. But the great thing about truth is that it can always make a comeback.
No comments:
Post a Comment