Is Postmodernism Really to Blame for Post-Truth?

Ken Taylor
Did postmodern attacks on truth do lasting damage to the fabric of society?

Josh Landy
Did they help to usher in a post-truth era—the era of anti-vaxxers, alternative facts, and climate denial?

Ken Taylor
Or can postmodern theory help us find a way out of our current political mess?

Josh Landy
Welcome to Philosophy Talk program that questions everything…

Ken Taylor
…except your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor.

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Landy. We’re here at the studios of KALW San Francisco.

Ken Taylor
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where I teach philosophy and Josh directs the philosophy and literature initiative.

Josh Landy
Today we’re asking: Is post modernism to blame for the post truth era?

Ken Taylor
Oh Josh, I don’t know. Look, I don’t like the post-truth era any more than than you do. And I get it that we got people like Kellyanne Conway talking about “alternative facts” and that sort of nonsense. But really seriously, what’s that got to do with postmodern theory?

Josh Landy
Well, I’m with Daniel Dennett on this. He blamed the postmodernists for what he called the the intellectual fad that made it respectable to be cynical about truth and facts.

Ken Taylor
Come on, seriously? Are you saying that all these post-truthers like the aforementioned Kellyanne Conway or Sarah Huckabee Sanders or Rudy Giuliani think they’ve been at least like sitting around like reading their Derrida? I don’t think—I wouldn’t give them that much credit.

Josh Landy
Well, I don’t know about those folks. But but take Mike Czernowicz, the alt-right conspiracy theorist. He said—I kid you not—”I read postmodernist theory in college. If everything’s a narrative that we need alternatives to the dominant narrative. I don’t seem like a guy who reads Lacan, do I?”

Ken Taylor
That’s a little wild, but surely he’s the exception. Come on, most of these post-truthers can’t read anything.

Josh Landy
Maybe, but look, the pernicious effects of postmodernism went way beyond the people who actually bothered to read it.

Ken Taylor
Oh, come on. How’s that supposed to have worked—they did mind control somehow?

Josh Landy
No, postmodern theory infected the culture at large, Ken, and once it did that it silenced the gatekeepers. It made experts reluctant to push back against nonsense. I mean, look, if everyone has his or her own truth, then who are the so-called experts to tell someone they’re wrong?

Ken Taylor
Well, those so called experts, come on. Did you ever notice who those experts all happen to be heterosexual white males? I mean, if you had to give postmodernism credit for silencing them that’s a good thing, because that means it liberated us from the hegemony of such people.

Josh Landy
Yeah, but by insisting there’s no truth.

Ken Taylor
By insisting that there is no single truth, Josh. But there are many truths. I mean, come on, postmodernism showed that the white male heterosexual worldview is just one view among others. It’s not any privileged sort of thing. So it struck a blow for equality—that’s a good thing.

Josh Landy
That is a good thing. But look, think about there are different ways of doing that. I think about people like DuBois or Beauvoir. Those folks, they criticize that kind of narrowness and bigotry, but in the name of truth. I mean, if you want to attack lies, just say they’re lies—you don’t have to say there’s no such thing as truth.

Ken Taylor
So well, but isn’t that what they were getting at? Isn’t what the postmodernists were really saying? I mean, think of John Baudrillard. He wasn’t celebrating the fact that everyone now has their own truth. He was actually lamenting that.

Josh Landy
Whoa, slow down, Ken. Llook, a minute ago, you were saying there’s no objective truth. Now you’re saying there is. You’re doing exactly what post modernists do: you’re you’re contradicting yourself.

Ken Taylor
Well, Josh, come on, seriously. Haven’t you heard? A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

Josh Landy
Oh, well, you must have a really big mind if it’s gonna contain all those po-mo contradictions.

Ken Taylor
Okay, touché. But in all seriousness, Baudrillard, I think he’s a good example. He took himself to be warning us about the post-truth world he saw us busily falling into. And he thought of himself as giving us tools to understand it. So if you think of it that way, postmodernism didn’t cause the post-truth problem—it’s gonna help us solve the post-truth problem.

Josh Landy
Well, maybe for Baudrillard. But what about Derrida or Rorty? I mean, Rorty came right out and said “No scientific description is an accurate representation of the way the world is.” Climate deniers will be delighted to hear that

Ken Taylor
I’m sure they are. I’m sure they are delighted to hear that, but I don’t think that’s at all what postmodernists intended. They weren’t giving succor to climate deniers. What want they wanted to do was challenge traditional power structures, and they wanted to bring about a more inclusive politics. Surely, that’s a good thing.

Josh Landy
That is a good thing. But why did they need to ditch truth in order to get there, Ken? Think about Rorty saying “the very idea of a fact of the matter is one we’d be better off without.” I mean, would we really be better off without a fact of the matter about climate change? No way. You can’t just duck the consequences of your views just because you didn’t intend them.

Ken Taylor
Well okay, look, you know, I’m going to concede one thing. There’s a lot to talk about here. And maybe our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Holly J. McDede, can help. We said her to investigate what today’s philosophers from around the world think about the relationship between post-truth and postmodernism. She files this report.

Marjorie Perloff
My name is Marjorie Perloff. I’m a retired, chaired professor at Stanford University.

Justin Smith
My name is Justin E.H. Smith. I am a professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Paris, Denis Diderot.

Alexis Papazoglou
I’m Alexis Papazoglou. I used to teach philosophy at Royal Holloway at the University of London and before that, the University of Cambridge.

Ken Houston
my name is Ken Houston, and I lecture in international relations at Webster University’s Thailand campus.

Marjorie Perloff
When the term postmodernism originally was used, it was used almost synonymously with the avant-garde. Postmodernism was everything that was new and cool and different.

Justin Smith
I do take postmodernism to be an irrationalist tendency, to the extent that well, how should we define it? Should we define it with say, Lyotard and say that postmodernism is the view that there are no longer any grand, overarching narratives? That sounds like a pretty good way to start.

Marjorie Perloff
It became taken over by the French theorists like Derrida, Foucault, and so forth. And then it started to get a negative meaning of not believing in anything, no truth. Anything goes.

Alexis Papazoglou
It was, I think, the morning of the US presidential election, when I was leading a graduate seminar or Nietzsche’s critique of truth back in London. And there seems to be a kind of eerie echo in relation to what was going on at the time, and what Nietzsche was suggesting, namely that there was no kind of objective truth and the concept of truth that most philosophers have relied on until then was a kind of philosophical hoax.

Marjorie Perloff
But the idea that it is responsible for the conditions today—I think no, on the contrary, I think what is responsible for the conditions today are the social media, which nobody had quite dreamt of in the heyday of postmodernism.

Ken Houston
Blaming postmodernism for today’s manifest problem like post-truth and the breakdown of shared understandings actually inhibits our ability to comprehend and examine the real reasons why we have these problems.

Justin Smith
What we’re calling the post-truth moment doesn’t mean that people care less about truth than before. It only means that there is a particularly new powerful technology for the spreading of lies.

Holly McDede
For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. McDede

Ken Taylor
Thanks, Holly, for that report with many truths that no one truth articulated in a postmodern fashion. I’m Ken Taylor, with me is my Stanford colleague, Josh Landy. And today we’re asking: is the post-truth era the fault of postmodern theory?

Josh Landy
We’re joined now by Thomas de Zengotita, contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine, and author of “Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live In It.” Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Thomas.

Thomas de Zengotita
Thank you.

Ken Taylor
So Thomas, you’re deeply interested in postmodernism and post-truth politics and how the two relate or don’t relate. But how did this how did you first get interested in this subject matter?

Thomas de Zengotita
I first got interested in in what I later realized was the essence of the post truth age when I was in acting school and method acting school method means you don’t act you react, you live in the moment, a bunch of us actors were in the dance studio, someone came in and said the president, meaning President Kennedy had been shot. Somebody else whispered, it’s an improvisation. And we all immediately fell into the business of being real in that moment, and went on for 20 minutes, people sobbing and screaming. And finally someone else came in and had a radio and we suddenly found out that this wasn’t an improv that it was real. And in that moment, the difference between reality and representation became so stark as I watched it being eroded and erased. And that, to me, is the essence of postmodernism.

Ken Taylor
That’s transformative moment.

Josh Landy
And, you know, you’ve obviously been a lover of postmodernism ever since but I think you know that it has a bad name.

Thomas de Zengotita
I don’tknow where you get that idea. It’s just not the case.

Josh Landy
Well okay, so maybe we could talk about that. because I’m sure you know that in some circles like this one right here it has not such a good name. So what do you think, you know, why did you get that name? And do you think it’s deserved?

Thomas de Zengotita
No, I think if by postmodernism, we mean the academic brouhaha about the canon and the French theory and all of that, though, one of your roving reporter guests said it best I mean, that’s just got nothing or neck No, not nothing, not nothing has an influence. But practically nothing to do with the rise of post truth politics, as you understand it, the guest who said that had to do with the new technologies and the social techniques, that was correct.

Ken Taylor
So women, so post modernism in the academic circles, so let’s talk about that for a second. I mean, I my side of the campus, I’m a philosopher, I’m an analytically trained philosopher, although I fallen away from the high church in certain ways. On my side of the campus, there were these bitter cultural wars. I mean, they were mostly contained within the academy. I don’t know who won those cultural wars, but they were bitter. Do you think? I mean, do you think that was just nothing was just sound and fury Signifying nothing?

Thomas de Zengotita
No, like everything else that happens on the level of ideology and sort of conscious articulation, it reflected what was really going on in the world. And if you go back and parse out the details of the of those arguments, you’ll discover that the underlying theme has to do with whether or not you can clearly separate representation from reality.

Josh Landy
But that sounds like the kind of thing that those academics were talking about.

Thomas de Zengotita
Very much so. What they were talking about, it’s strictly in their academic terms. Meanwhile, the difference between representation and reality, in life in society itself is disappearing. That’s what mattered. The academic discourse was just reflecting on us.

Josh Landy
You tell us an anecdote a moment ago about the death of Kennedy. And I mean, surely everyone could tell the difference. I mean, maybe of course, act if an actor is a good actor, they give the impression of someone who was mourning, but it’s not like you don’t know the difference if that’s what your story was about. Your story is all about that.

Thomas de Zengotita
Listen up. 30 years later, I’m watching the mourners for Princess Diana on the streets of London. And I’m reminded of that actor, the actress moment, and I’m watching those mourners. I’m realizing their grief is real, but but they are also performing it.

Ken Taylor
Okay, they’re performing that? I’m not sure connect that up to your I get that that their grief is real. They’re not just representing grief. They’re performing their grief.

Thomas de Zengotita
I call that representing it. By performing it, I mean, representing it.

Ken Taylor
Right. Okay. But why is that a distinctively postmodern thought? That’s what I don’t get to really because then my go to a break.

Thomas de Zengotita
Because they’re, at some level, conscious of themselves doing so. And they build and construct a performative life more or less like building a work of art.

Ken Taylor
I think I get it. We’ll come back to it. I think I get what you’re saying. And I think there’s a deep point there. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about post modernism and post truth with Thomas de Zengotita, author of “Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live In It.”

Josh Landy
Did postmodernism diagnose the ills of our post-truth world, or did it help to create them? And why were so many famous thinkers so excited about the idea of a post truth society? Haven’t recent events proven them profoundly mistaken?

Ken Taylor
Postmodernism: utopia, dystopia, or myopia? Plus your calls and emails, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Robyn
My truth, your truth, his truth, her truth—it doesn’t matter as long as it’s true.

Ken Taylor
My truth, your truth, his truth, her truth…Will the real truth—if there is such a thing—please stand up. I’m Ken Taylor. This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy. And today we’re thinking about post-truth and postmodernism. Our guest is Thomas de Zengotita author of “Postmodern Theory and Progressive Politics: Toward a New Humanism.?

Ken Taylor
So Thomas, let’s dig in. I mean, we were getting toward this at the end of the first segment there. But let’s dig in a little deeper into what post modernism actually says it is. So I look if you had to sum it up and give you the test of summing it up. How would you crystallize the central idea of post modernism?

Thomas de Zengotita
I think I’d take Richard Rorty moderate, modest articulation of it. And it basically says what Hegel meant when he said, philosophy is an age grasped and thought. I’m now talking about what I’m answering your question in terms of academic postmodern is gay. So I that broadly speaking, I think that the truths that we tell each other are shaped fashioned by historical cultural circumstances. That doesn’t mean that they don’t have some objective truth value. By the way, that’s just not the way to think about our Rorty said, well let him know on the on the contrary, on the contrary, the kind of objectivity he was talking about, was the kind that John Dewey articulated when he made exactly the same point when he introduced Americans to pragmatism. It isn’t that there isn’t any objectivity. It’s just the danger of its there’s no absolute objectivity. Well, right, the enemy is the absolute, not the truth.

Ken Taylor
So Rorty thought of himself, as I gather, he was my colleague for a while, but not in my same department. But he was in Comp Lit, rather than philosophy. But Rorty thought of himself, first, he thought of himself as an old style analytic philosopher. He was what’s called an eliminative materialist. That’s a long thing I’m not going to explain. Then he thought of himself as a pragmatist. And then literary theorist got all gaga over him, because they thought of him as a postmodernist. So are you telling me that post modernism really, is it? People fail to talk to each other a lot in this era? Oh, boy, are you really telling me that post modernism is really deeply allied to American style pragmatism?

Thomas de Zengotita
Very, very much. So. I mean, I like in substance substance, you know,

Josh Landy
If it really were that I think I would, I would have an easier time with it. But you know, I have this issue a lot when I talk to defendants post modernism, that they want to claim certain things on behalf of these thinkers, but but Rorty said, you know, straight out objects are not more objectively described in any vocabulary than any other. And I could list you a series of quotes from him.

Ken Taylor
Yeah. But he was trying to be a pragmatist and saying that, because William James says stuff like that, there’s the, the thing that matters is not what’s out there, as it were, but what I’m can’t remember the exact quote from James, but But it’s what, what we make of what presses in on us, the world just rushes in what the world does, it just puts energy on our sensory apparatus. And what we make of that in wash of energy is entirely up to us to dictate that.

Josh Landy
But there’s two kinds of pragmatism, right? I mean, there’s the the kind that says, let’s just figure out and we’re already sometimes talking about this way, let’s just figure out the best solution to our problems. And that I’m totally in favor with off but the other kind of practices is a pragmatic theory of truth. Right? So Rory thought in order to do to solve the world’s problems, we have to get rid of the notion of truth and he said the very notion of a fact of the matter is one would be better off without.

Ken Taylor
But Tom, what do you think?

Thomas de Zengotita
Well, yeah, but there’s a larger context, I’m sure and my guess is just in my guess is that if you dig into it, you’ll find him objecting to is the idea of some absolute objectivity.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, absolute. I’ve given his route through this, his route to post modernism again, Brody’s high church analytic he wrote the that he collected He added that the the essay was the Bible of linguistics turn.

Thomas de Zengotita
Right. Read his introduction to the second edition.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, yeah. So he was he started out analytic philosophy, the linguistic turn, the analysis of meaning all that stuff.

Thomas de Zengotita
That’s what made him so annoying to the analytic people. trade them, right, he was in and when he became president of the American Philosophical Association, the place went bananas, practically a riot.

Ken Taylor
But what I, what he thought, as opposed to what people thought of of him, is that philosophy in the mirror of nature and all that stuff, was just the natural development of the of where he started out, it was just a natural outcome. So when he’s talking about the absence of objective facts, he’s being James Ian, pragmatist. That’s really what he’s doing. And the pragmatic theory of truth, so but that’s the that’s not really how most people think of post modernism, they don’t think of it. They don’t come at it through the route of a Rorty who started out through this French route, right?

Thomas de Zengotita
I grant I’ll grant you that and that’s why I stressed when I was responding before the idea of the substance Okay, now when it comes to the style All right, that was so annoying to so many traditional academics. The the the French style and the the obscurity, the tensional game playing with words and all of that stuff. Ronnie never did that. But rhat’s what people think.

Josh Landy
Let me tell you something about Rorty and this is what it’s so of course, on the one hand, there’s the things that postman is set, right? So they said a lot of things like Johnny Fatima has an essay farewell to truth they settle are things about the impossibility of truth or nonexistence of truth, but it’s how they behave that really proved they didn’t care about the truth. So Derrida, Derrida, for example, insisting high and low on his rights as an author proved he was never serious. I had a conversation with roti once I asked him why you’re attributing these views to nature, when he doesn’t really have them and wrote he said, It makes him a more interesting philosophy. Well, and that’s a verbatim quote,

Ken Taylor
Let’s get into the weeds.

Thomas de Zengotita
I bet you had to be there. I bet you had to be there.

Josh Landy
They clearly didn’t care.

Ken Taylor
Okay, but I want to back up a bit. Because one of the things because I don’t want to get in the weeds of interpreting, we’ve been talking about how post modernism got its bad reputation and whether Yeah, is deserved, right. And I think that’s a complicated thing. I think it got its bad reputation. Because there were a lot of bad writers and bad thinkers, who said some things that were true and some things that were false, and then mixed them all up. That’s what I think, but that I don’t think that’d be gospel. I’m just one guy. But the thing that the postmodernist were aiming at, and I think this is an all of them was, it was a liberatory movement. It was supposed to liberate us from the hegemony of all these old, this old order, which desert eliminated—liberated, so tell me how—

Thomas de Zengotita
That’s the part of me that is—does see something redemptive and promising about postmodernism.

Ken Taylor
So tell me how that’s supposed to work?

Thomas de Zengotita
Well, I think if everyone would just settle down and be as afraid of autocratic populism, on the rise in the world, all over the world, thanks to the post truth moment, in many ways, and you know, rational people on all sides of this debate, just hang their grudges up in the closet, and get serious about what is worth saving in the postmodern agenda, namely, the liberation of gays, women, minorities of all sorts, that whole thing was good. That was right. And if the Canon had to suffer a few decades of abuse, in order to make that happen, that’s a small price to pay for progress, given the bloody history of art.

Ken Taylor
Well, we’ll come back to that this because that’s an intriguing and provocative thought. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk we’re talking about post modernism and post truth politics, whether post modernism caused or can cure post truth politics, and we’ve got Lee, all the way from Boston’s on the line. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Lee, you must be listening online. Thanks for doing so.

Lee
Yeah, thank you very much. Enjoy your program. So I’m a philosopher. I’m at the Center for philosophy, history of science at Boston University. And I’ve got a book called “Post-Truth” where I’ve got a chapter claiming that post modernism is one of the roots, okay, post truth. And here’s my evidence, at least part of post truth is science, denial, climate change, denial, anti Vax, things like that. But before those which are relatively modern came evolution denial. And in my chapter, I talk about Robert Penick, another philosopher, who’s done all the scholarship to show that the one of the founders of the intelligent design theory, Philip Johnson, was a postmodernist, Philip Johnson, their extensive quotations, where he says things like, I mean, he says, verbatim, he’s a postmodernist and a deconstructionist, but that he’s aiming at a slightly different target, while the target He’s aiming at is evolution. And what he means to do is to deconstruct evolution, by showing that, you know, well, you can’t just say that evolution is true, and that creationism is not you have to really teach both, which is what post truth is all about. It’s the idea of exploding. The idea that there’s one truth and claiming that there are many truths. And then that way you can you know, shoehorn all sorts of false things into the cloud and public consciousness

Ken Taylor
Lee, thanks for the provocative and intelligent and insightful comment. I’m going to push that to Thomas and see how he responds, but thanks a lot for the call. What do you think, Tom?

Thomas de Zengotita
I think I don’t know this particular gentleman or quote, but I know for a fact that a lot of people on the right both religious right in the political right took great pleasure in pretending that they were being influenced by post modernism and advancing things like anti evolution and different discourses.

Josh Landy
There was no difference between pretense and reality.

Thomas de Zengotita
Oh, I didn’t say I said representation. Performances are pretenses just shows you’ve never been to—

Ken Taylor
Okay, you guys come on, come down. I’m gonna be the referee here, but I’ll put the point a slightly differently. Okay. Suppose it’s a mistake of the The right that you talked about to take post modernism as their suppose it is a mistake, it’s a mistake that post modernism in its excesses invites, and diagnosis has nothing to guard itself against.

Thomas de Zengotita
I agree, I agree. And the 80% of me that thinks that post modernists are again, I’m talking about the academy now made, you know, made huge, unnecessary, excessive gestures. And I don’t want to just horse manure all over the place and giant errors that they made tactically, strategically stylistically, mold, so much of it unnecessary, real waste. The cause was just,

Ken Taylor
You seem like a guy who really wants to save postmodernism from itself.

Thomas de Zengotita
Right. It’s very nice that, I’m gonna remember that. That’s beautiful. That’s exactly what I’m trying to do.

Josh Landy
And I have to say, you know, I think, you know, by stripping away some of these excesses, I feel like you’re making the strongest case for it. But But I want to ask you a question even about the strongest case, because because I, you know, I’m very tempted by the idea that it’s a way of dismantling this kind of hierarchy, and this sort of, you know, a kind of predominance over the intellectual space of, you know, cisgender, heterosexual white males. And that seems like a thing that’s worth dismantling. So the question, the question I have there is, did it have to be done in this way, because it seems like there are two routes to a kind of democratization of the intellectual space, one of which is essentially, a kind of populism where you say, Look, you don’t really need any formal training, whatever you come in with whatever idea you currently have, that’s equally valid, as valid as anybody else’s. So it’s kind of as it were lowering the bar. And then the other route is essentially raising up of the general population, a universal education, let’s really make a serious good faith effort to get everyone involved in higher education, to, you know, to diversify the faculty to do all those things that would actually that’s, you know, keeping the bar high, but moving everyone as much as possible in the direction of those heights. Now, I worry that post modernism is basically the first solution. It’s saying, Well, look, you know, ultimately, anything goes and your view is as good as mine and the experts, you know, expertise is just to kind of cover for hegemony. And I’m not entirely comfortable with that.

Thomas de Zengotita
I worry about that, too. And that’s the that is the the messy again, that’s, I don’t need to repeat myself, the way they went about this was a disaster.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, yeah. So we got another caller on the line, Sam from Alameda. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Sam, what’s your comment or question?

Sam
Yeah, hi. I wonder if you guys can look this up with Zen Buddhist kind of notion of the name is not the same. And what I was taught a long time ago about extreme relativism, where everything depends on everything else.

Ken Taylor
Well, that’s a good question. I don’t know if I can, but maybe Tom, can you link up with Buddhism?

Thomas de Zengotita
This is yeah, the Nietzsche’s rightly been cited as sort of the fountainhead of all this his earliest essay, truth lies in the non moral sense. He was a hell of a critic of Buddhism, but he he would have bought completely the name is not the thing. And the whole problem for him was the language was simply inadequate. One of you guys said about energy coming at us our sensors and AI we can’t just can’t our languages and equip. That’s Dewey’s basic thing. Our language is simply now here I part company with I think the exception to that has proven itself so far to be mathematics. Well, almost, I’d be almost in Daniel Dennett can Yeah, comes to mathematic?

Ken Taylor
Well, I wouldn’t be I think mathematics, pure mathematics is a realm of fictional object. But I think this is a problem, I think, is a very deep problem that I don’t know that any philosophy has the answer to Kant had an answer, we make the world right, I mean, the inward rush from the outward world, we have no idea what the outward world is doing on itself, reconstruct the world in accordance with these categories. And that’s where this whole mess gets going with a Kantian insight.

Thomas de Zengotita
I couldn’t agree with you more. I couldn’t agree with you more. And when I say the excessive ways in which post modernism went about its business, driven by this political fury at the injustice of the hierarchy that you’ve referred to, and they’re young, they’re kids, it’s the 60s. I mean, come on.

Josh Landy
I agree. I totally agree with your diagnosis. I guess the the question I have is, look, if ultimately, the good part of post modernism reduces back to the kinds of things that Kant was saying, which are really fascinating, important, then why did we need post modernism?

Ken Taylor
Well, because it was only the start of it. Because Kant was, Kant thought these the categories and the organizing stuff were fixed once and for all and universal and all that stuff. And then when you start to have a Galeon historicizing of this.

Thomas de Zengotita
That’s right, exactly right. That’s why I went to the Hegel thing about age grasping thought. But But yeah, exactly. I don’t need that.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, yeah. Well, so look, we’re agreed that there’s some important and deep impulses in we’re behind postmodernism, married with a lot of confusion and rhetoric and stuff. We agreed about that. But what I want to know and what we’ll get to in the next segment, is how we go forward. Right from this moment, you’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re thinking about post modernism and post truth with Tomas de Zengotita, author of “Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live In It.”

Josh Landy
Could postmodern theory help us imagine a better way of doing politics? Could it actually offer solutions rather than just exacerbating problems,

Ken Taylor
The possibility of progressive politics of Pomo—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Depeche Mode
It’s time to face the consequence for delivering the proof in the policy of truth.

Ken Taylor
Are postmodern theories really to blame for those who pursued policies of untruth? I’m Ken Taylor, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy. And our guest is Thomas de Zengotita, a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine. We’re thinking about post-truth and postmodernism.

Ken Taylor
So Thomas, I think you don’t like our political current political landscape any more than I do, or Josh does, I try get the clear impression. And we’re all devoted to finding ways to reshape and ameliorate that landscape. The thing I’m not sure of is that postmodern thought, even in its best form has a way of helping us make your best case that postmodern thought can somehow help us reconfigure this political landscape.

Thomas de Zengotita
Among the many excessive blunders that postmodern theorists made was turning their back on the phenomenology and phenomenology and philosophy. I’m talking about Husserl. Heidegger Merleau Ponty. Part of their attack on modernity and on the modern subject was was an excessive dismantling of phenomenology. phenomenology as a way of doing philosophy still holds open the possibility of dealing with difference with respect and at the same time discovering what what common essences or whatever you want, that’s a common truth, real truths about the human condition, and that had the possibilities of phenomenology have yet to be explored, especially in relation to anthropology. That’s what I’m working on now.

Ken Taylor
So tell me more about that. I mean, so phenomenology um, and that’s not my bailiwick. But I take it, here’s a crude statement of phenomenology, first person lived experience is deeply revelatory of, of trues, that can’t be captured in any other from any other perspective. I mean, physics is not going to replace first person experience as a source of tumor. I mean, it may supplement it right, but it’s not going to replace it. Okay, but starting and, and respecting the autonomy and integrity of first person lived experience, how is that going to help us ameliorate the political landscape,

Thomas de Zengotita
Because it is possible to discover by starting with first person lived experience, constituents of first person lived experience that you know, and I can’t justify this in this context right now that we don’t have time. But it makes it possible for you to know that certain aspects of your first person lived experience are universal. If I could have the time, just to go to an anthropology example, and why I think anthropology is so important with this, I’m talking about reviving the project of philosophical anthropology, there is no culture known to the anthropological archive that I know of, where if equally ranked people encounter each other in a public place. And one of the people greets the other person, and the other person doesn’t return the greeting there’s, that is universally an insult. That’s an ethical universal. It’s so interesting, the beginning of a new politics.

Josh Landy
This is one of the things I love about your work that you’re trying to rescue some of these beliefs that seem to be being put under pressure by by the post modernists. But that’s right. Totally. I take it that when they would say back to that, I’m just being devil’s advocate here, but they would say that is this universal these universals you’re talking about are just pseudo universals and they’re just a kind of a mask for power right there.

Thomas de Zengotita
I just when—that’s why I need to go to the anthropology because that’s just empirical. If what I’m saying is empirical just straightforward like to a kid in the kitchen, your mouth is covered with jam Did you eat the cookies? You know, that kind of truth, that level of truth. So there’s no argument.

Ken Taylor
That’s not, sure Okay, again, I’m not a postmodernist, I don’t think I don’t even try to play one on the radio. But here’s the thing that the post modernism does, or purports to do this subject this, so he, he doesn’t undermine the lived experience in the way say that reductionistic science does, right? It doesn’t undermine the subject in that way. But it does undermine the subject in another way, it does challenge the subject, because it says, Look, you’re always historically situated, you’re always shaped by these forces that you don’t know. And when you claim that your subjectivity gives rise to universals, that you can parade as universals, you’re just, that’s just a lie. You’re just self deceived. You don’t understand the true sources of yourself.

Thomas de Zengotita
Again, forgive me I but I just, that’s just wrong. I have a real really interesting deep reading of let’s say, Heidegger on equipment, the nature of equipment, Tality, and tools. And I mean, he just is like 25 pages and being in time, all you have to do is look at different cultures have different tools, all cultures have some tools, right? Why do they have two different cultures have way different ways of eating, but they all have ways to stand?

Ken Taylor
I’m not there’s no culture, which is not a way of eating. I’m not against universals. I’m not against cultural universals. Indeed, I’m a deep believer in something that some post modernists don’t believe it. I believe that the evolution design the human mind, and just as there are linguistic universals, there are cultural universals. But wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, okay, here’s the thing, what I can’t figure out is how you’re supposed to rescue such an insight within post modernism. That’s what I don’t get with, without going like the Kantian route, that the mind has a fixed architecture and all that sort of stuff, but they reject that they go this alien route.

Thomas de Zengotita
Yeah, no, no, this is the point at which you say, Okay, you guys, your moment came and your moment went, just as Rorty would said, about everybody’s moment. You know, you performed an enormously important task with the political, you know, the political agenda that you had for for justice for, for everybody, real justice for everybody. But you know, time to go away. Time to rethink what you’re really up to. You just pay attention to the faces of people in Black Lives Matter and talking about what just look at these kids faces, and tell me that they’re not asking to be respected as a human being, I guess, gay marriage became marriage equality, because it was implicitly understood. Wait a minute, it was humanity.

Ken Taylor
I think I’ve been framing you a wrong way. I think right. I think you would fight when I said it.

Thomas de Zengotita
no, no, when you called me a fan of postmodernism—

Ken Taylor
That was Josh. But I said, I said, and you accepted that you’re, you’re the person who’s trying to save postmodernism from yourself from itself. That you said, That’s right. That’s where I’m gonna but you’re trying to say the postmodern ism, you’re done. You’re ,done your day is over.

Thomas de Zengotita
What’s the difference? It’s overcome, you know, it’s self overcoming is the path to fulfillment?

Ken Taylor
Well, here’s the difference. Okay, okay. You’re a fun guy, Tom. You’re a fun guy. You’re fun to talk to you, but don’t go out contradictory and here’s the difference. Here’s the difference. I’m not trying to save the Republican Party from well, in some moods, I want to save the Republican Party from itself and make it be a better Republican Party, a true market oriented party and all that sort of stuff. I think, Okay, you guys, we need two parties, not just one, you get to be the market party, but you don’t get to be the xenophobic racist. The anti gay you don’t get to be that party. You get to be a modern capitalist party in a two party democracy. Okay, that’s what but if you’re going to be that hodgepodge of anti modernism anti racist xenophobia if you’re going to be that Republican Party, I’d rather you just go away and be replaced by a new party. So what is it is are you like, okay, postmodern party shape up and jettison all the nonsense are you like postmodern party go away, and let us replace you by another party?

Thomas de Zengotita
Given those options, I would say post modernism jettison all the nonsense, get serious and realize that you were wrong about the just because there’s no absolute truth doesn’t mean there’s no truth. And just because there’s the modern subject isn’t the iconic representative of all human subjectivity doesn’t mean that there aren’t unique human subjects that are the essential ethical and political fancy

Ken Taylor
You sound more like an existentialist than a postmodernist to me.

Thomas de Zengotita
So, again, you you wrote some one of you rightly said that the the, the ways in which post modernism kind of confused itself are manifold and one of them is they made themselves sound a whole lot more different from existentialists than they actually were right.

Josh Landy
Yeah. And I wonder if this is another place for phenomenology to come back in? I mean, you made a very nice argument earlier about phenomenology as a route to the discovery universals. Would you also say that maybe it’s a, it’s a possible route to respect, right? If we, if we give a kind of serious and loving attention to the first person perspective, then you know, I should honor and, and take seriously be interested in your—

Thomas de Zengotita
That’s why I use the example of the of the of the greeting to start. Right. Right. And that’s also why I call your attention to the faces of the of the people who’ve been victims of systematic injustice, recognition, it all begins with recognition. So I could be you, you could be me, right?

Ken Taylor
So that that, okay, that I like a lot. But and sometimes people get taught, hooked up, all tangled up over the goodness and badness of identity politics, and identity politics, we’ve done episodes on identity politics, let’s say in our time is something of a mess. But I want to replace the talk of identity politics with and some people talk this way of talk, talk of a politics of recognition, where there is the other, I recognize the other, I recognize something of myself in the other and Okay, other let’s build a world together. Right? I’m with you, man. I told I’m too I’m with you, too. And that doesn’t seem to me particularly postmodern idea. It doesn’t seem to me an anti modern idea. It but it does seem to me, here’s the thing, I think about the old Locky and kind of democratic politics and all that sort of it was mostly insincere, but at its core, there was also in Rousseau and Locke and the social contract there. And it was also fundamentally I recognizing you, a person who has sovereignty over him or herself. And let’s build a world together. Okay. They weren’t always they weren’t always consistent, because they saw the black other and they said, Oh, I don’t recognize you.

Thomas de Zengotita
Right, Fanon, in “Wretched of the Earth, He says, you know, Western European modernity is articulated all the ideas we need for a just world they just don’t practice it.

Ken Taylor
Right. So, politics and the reform of politics, should we just hold ourselves to these modernist ideas of recognition? Or do we have to go beyond the modernist ideas? What do you think that’ll be your last the thought to go beyond?

Thomas de Zengotita
I, I think the, I think it would be possible to call the idea of recognition, a modernist one justly, but the struggle on a practical political level for actual recognition.

That fraught—oh, that was fraught.

That was the achievement of the postmodern moment, the hypocrisy of modernist humanism had to be exposed because there was not genuine recognition of the other in it. There was in principle recognition, but that’s not real.

Ken Taylor
Oh, well, I know just because people are hypocrites.

Thomas de Zengotita
But yeah. I’m all about ethics. If you want to know my bottom line, bottom line, is politics better. Go back to ethics.

Ken Taylor
Yes. On that note, I’m gonna thank you for joining us. It’s been a lively conversation. And you know what, I think there was even some truth in it.

Thomas de Zengotita
I think so too, I believe in a small-t truth.

Ken Taylor
Okay, our guest has been Thomas de Zengotita, a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine and author of “Postmodern Theory and Progressive Politics: Toward a New Humanism.” So Josh, are you more well- or ill-disposed toward post modernism?

Josh Landy
It’s complicated. I mean, I really like Tom’s super stripped down Pomo. But as you say, it starts to sound like something that isn’t necessarily Pomo anymore and existentialism and I still worry that, you know, we kind of we’ve let our guard down as Kurt Anderson’s point, you know, the spread of postmodernist theory into the wider culture has made the gatekeepers let the guard down. And that’s not been a good thing.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, no, I agree with you there. But you know what this conversation continues at philosophers corner at our online community of thinkers where her motto is Cogito ergo Blago, I think therefore I blog, and you can become a partner in that community. And please do by visiting our website, philosophytalk.org.

Josh Landy
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments@philosophytalk.org and we may feature it on our blog. Now, a man who cares at least as much about speed as he does about truth—yt’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
In Shoales… The hermeneutics of suspicion refers to the trains of thought that rose with the Modern Age- Freudianism, Marxism, Darwinism. Then we started putting monkey wrenches in those monkey wrenches, and we are where we are now, trying to turn ignorance into bliss, and not remembering how. When I was in college it was all about the literature of exhaustion. Fiction was experimental, because it was easier to write in lower case stream of consciousness that to map out a thousand page novel, unless you’re writing an airport thriller. Come to think of it, there actually was an airport thriller called AIRPORT. And there’s your post modern literature of exhaustion right there. Like a murderer whose name is killer. Ironic! Post modernism is kind of like dada, only self conscious about it, with college degree prominently displayed. It’s not a rejection of ideas so much as taking them to their logical extreme. Culturally we get movies like STAR WARS, which began as an homage to pot boiler movie serials, straight faced, almost a parody, but has since, in its cultural impact, become equivalent to Greek mythology. How did that happen? We don’t know. Our certainties are our doubts. We know we don’t know about chemtrails, vaccinations, who killed Kennedy, who swung the votes for Trump, if identity is fluid or not. Those and other worries keep the prescription drugs flowing. But nobody really cares if we went to the moon, really, unless you’re an astronaut. We’re probably not going again, unless we can build a mid sized town up there, like the Green Zone in Iraq, or Des Moines. I realized just the other day that I’d forgotten what Marxism is, I mean its manifestations. Mao was kind of sniffy about Stalin, but peasants versus factory workers aside were there really that many differences between the two? Again, when I was in college many literary critics were described as “Marxist,” and I’d think are you kidding me? Soon enough though this fiddley Marxism was supplanted by radical feminism and by what is now called “theory.” Post modernism! All this just seems like ways to read Paradise Lost, for example, without falling asleep. Christianity too got shaken up in the late 19th Century. A guy named Scofield put out a Bible with annotations, which became the template for what is now called post millennial dispensationalism. See, there are two versions of the Second Coming. The Catholic version, so to speak, has Jesus meeting us in the middle of the air as we are swept up bodily to heaven. The end. The modern version has Christians being lifted out of their shoes, no Jesus in sight. As sinners mill around, confused, the Antichrist shows up, disguised as a charismatic Bosnian Industrialist, ushering in a false prosperity, and then a global war, ending in Israel, with many converted Jews and millennial saints getting snatched off to heaven, as the damned go down to hell with the Industrialist, long since revealed as indwelling Satan. Good stuff. Everybody loves the Rapture, even non believers. It brings post modern joy. But, not to be critical, what is the point of that period between the Rapture, and the final battle? Christians are taken up TWICE? Catholics are right, seems to me. Cut to the defeat of Satan, and THEN do the Rapture, like driving home after the fireworks. Those are the endtime choices though. No use waiting for another spin on it. We’re done with all that, it would have too negative an effect on Israel foreign policy. We will not have a Kruschevist version of communism, no Billy Graham ite theology. The end of history was not eschatological at all, just another damn epoch. History 2.0. All that we have left of communism is political correctness, and the antifa, who for some reason are more feared by the media that the fa. What’s that all about? I guess fascism will never go out of style, other than that it is a post modern world. All opinions, no dogma. Can’t cure cancer, but we can make a razor that shaves closer. Dialectical materialism? Forget about it. History, whatever else it might be, is not science. Realizing that made me grateful for the post modern surge of unbelieving, or disbelieving, or whatever was brought to that table, if in fact it was a table. Mao gave us the concept of third world countries. Post modernism gave us the concept of first world problems. See the difference? I gotta go.

Ken Taylor
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2019.

Josh Landy
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Ken Taylor
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Josh Landy
Thanks also to Merle Kessler, Angela Johnston, and Lauren Schecter.

Ken Taylor
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Josh Landy
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Ken Taylor
Not even when they’re true and reasonable.

Josh Landy
The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you too can become a partner in our community of thinkers. I’m Josh Landy.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Thank you for listening,

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

Noam Chomsky
I think the effect is pretty clear. It allows people to take a very radical stance—you know, more radical than though—but to be completely dissociated from anything that’s happening for many reasons. One reason is nobody can understand a word they’re saying.