And how to cast it into the dustbin of history.
In my last article, “The Advancing Nihilism and the Rot of Post-Modernism in the West,” I submitted that the culture wars taking place in the streets and universities across the United States and parts of Europe were symptoms of a larger moral pandemic whose philosophic roots both spawned and legitimized anarchical impulses run amok. I pointed out that moral relativism advances the idea that there are no objective criteria to adjudicate among competing truth claims. Its ruling principle is subjectivism. What one feels is the truth constitutes the truth. Logic and reason, according to the more radical school of subjectivism, is the creation of racist and imperialist white constructs. But if nihilism is the logical concomitant of relativism, one must now ask: what is the school and the philosophical foundation of relativism? What first foundational principles underscore the relativism that gives rise to the nihilism in the streets and in our educational systems?
That school of thought is postmodernism. If you want to see the connection between calls for a decolonized syllabus and indiscriminate vandalism of all statues because they are simply representations of the past and representative of men of a racial orientation; if you want to see metaphysical rage directed aimlessly at the universe, anger directed at everyone but no one in particular, look no further than the school of postmodernism–a vicious anti-reason and, therefore, anti-life phenomenon that robs human beings of a particular method of cognition. It deprives them of integrating fundamental principles in order to offer clear and lucid thinking that leads to intelligible and reasonable actions. It cuts away at the idea of an objective reality and replaces it with an unbridled and amorphous, necrotic lump of feelings that are treated as tools of cognition. But these feelings are only the fears, prejudices and projections of chronically anxious people for whom truth is a death knell, as it emancipates them from their self-curated silos and forces them into a universe that cares only about facts, not feelings or wishful thinking.
Hence, hacking mindlessly at statues, “decolonizing syllabi,” and ridding educational courses of canonical dead white educators cannot magically bring about a new world order. And the perpetrators know it. So they resort to wanton destruction and nihilism. Ideas have consequences; and further, all actions, even nihilistic ones, are antecedently traceable back to some philosophical set of principles. Postmodern nihilism is the ruling school of thought guiding human actions today and destroying our civilization. Its ruling principles deserve to be elucidated and delineated clearly.
We may begin by contrasting it with the philosophy of The Enlightenment. This was a movement that sought to understand the world and humanity on a new rational basis. What is its fundamental premise? Human experience, whether in the natural world or in social life, is accessible to human reason and explicable in rational terms. It is equally accessible to all persons regardless of existential differences among humans. The Enlightenment project promulgated the idea that reason can locate truth with calendrical exactitude that is accessible to all human beings as human beings regardless of tribal, ascriptive identity. The Enlightenment project whose humanistic philosophic systems provided the legal, moral and political vocabularies for the abolition of slavery and the inclusion of persons who had been excluded from the human community within the domain of the ethical, admits another truism: moral learning does occur. It motivates the ethical behaviors of men and women who are driven to end oppression and injustice wherever they find them.
Post-modernism, on the other hand, is a disciplinary movement that questions the validity of modern science and offers strong resistance to any truth claims. Its defenders assert that truth claims are discriminatory and oppressive on the grounds that they are totalizing, hegemonic and definitive. Truth claims that are proven to be true are just those things, however. They become universal and prescriptive for all human beings based on our shared rational nature.
Post modernism rejects humanism and, above all, rejects what I would term as the greatest moral, political achievement so far in history: representative liberal democracy. Post-modernism hails a de-centering approach to all spheres of life or knowledge and categories. De-centering refers to an absence of everything and anything at the center of a thought system, or any overriding truth. It prefers concentrating at the margins. It privileges a form of skepticism that has little to do with suspending judgment until further evidence or judicious analysis and inspection of evidence reveal truth. It adopts an anti-foundational stance that discounts serious qualitative differences among viewpoints and then champions equal treatment of all. This, of course, exists in theory only. With a hysterical virulence, unusual in those who champion skepticism and tolerance, emotion-driven factionalism is the logical outcome of the post-modern’s anti-conceptual approach to issues. And so, its defenders will assert that any offense to their sensibilities is evil and must be expunged from the universe.
Jason D. Hill – FrontPage Mag – June 26, 2020.
