How did postmodernism go from skepticism in the 60s and 70s to egalitarianism in the 80s and 90s to power-activism in the 00s and 10s? Here is a 1,200-word excerpt from a 2016 interview of Stephen Hicks by Mark Michael Lewis.
Three Generations of Postmodernism: From Skepticism to Equality to Power Play
Stephen R. C. Hicks
SH: Right now we are third generation postmodernism. In first-generation post-modernism is high theory: a large number of people who are very well educated. One of the striking things about the leading postmodernists—Richard Rorty, Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault and so on—is that all of them are philosophy PhDs, all of them from very good graduate schools in Europe and the United States, getting a first rate education in epistemology. It’s really the rigor and depth of their understanding of where epistemology is—then [1940s-1950s] at a very skeptical moment—that gives them their power and the stature.
So you then have a movement that says, “Okay, we can’t know the truth. In fact, we should just stop talking about truth. That there may be only our truths.” So we relativize the concept of truth, or we take truth to be just a subjective projection of a possible reality out there.
That is integrated then with the politics, because all of the leading postmodern thinkers in the 50s and 60s, when they’re coming of age, are young men and young women, all of them Marxist or close to being Marxist. What the Marxism adds is a strong, adversarial stance toward the world, an adversarial stance toward what’s taken to be the dominant culture, and a breaking down of culture into sub-cultures, each of which has its own narrative that’s in competition and contradiction to the narratives of other sub-cultures.
But since we are skeptical, we don’t think that rationally we can sit down and have a good discussion and work out what the truth is. Instead, all we have is people strongly committed to contradictory value systems, and no possible way of rationally reconciling.
That’s first-generation postmodernism.
As it gains more adherents among young people who are university educated, some of them become professors themselves in the next generation. Or they go on to careers in intellectual life or in the arts community and become influential there. One way that comes out is in saying: “Well, if we are skeptical, then nobody really knows the truth. But there are dominant narratives and there are weaker narratives that are marginalized. So what we should do—and this is a second-generation thing—is push for a kind of equality.
No narrative that is truer or better than any other narrative—that’s what the first generation teaches us—so the second generation concludes that all narratives are equal. And so what we need to do is make equal space in the curriculum for all narratives.
Suppose we’re going to have the students read—I’m just making up a number here—100 books over the course of their university career. But right now 80 of those books are written by dead white European males and only a minority are by women, members of racial minorities, ethnic minorities, and so on. So in the name of kind of equality, diversity, fairness, and so on, what we should do is have a more equal representation of all voices across the curriculum.
That plays out as a kind of affirmative action for books. So then you say: if 40% of the population is white males, then maybe 40% of the books read will be written by white males. And if 17% of the population is Hispanic, then we should have 17% book representation, and so on. We’re going to go for some kind of equality of proportional representation. And you see that view manifesting itself in the late 1980s through the 90s and early 2000s.
But by the time we get to the third generation, the last ten years or so, that view starts to shift, for a couple of reasons.
One is that you then get demographically a higher percentage of people who are now professors and whose careers are based totally on teaching the previously under-represented books in the curriculum. That’s what they know. That’s what they’re interested in. That’s what they think is correct and or important. So they’re interested in further advancing the course of those books and those ideas the curriculum. And they’re not that interested in teaching the other traditions and the other perspectives. Some of them are, of course, just ideological teachers and not really professors in the best sense of the word.
But also—and this is an Ayn Rand insight, and behind her a Nietzschean insight—is those who are on the weaker side—that is, those who think they’ve been alienated and oppressed—learn to do, because of a certain kind of altruism (we can talk more about altruism, and its various uses later) is not merely push for a kind of equality between strong and weak, rich and poor, powerful and powerless, but rather to give special preference to those who are on the losing end of various social forces. The view becomes that we should actively sacrifice the stronger for the sake of the weaker, sacrifice the richer for the sake of the poor, sacrifice the oppressors on behalf of the oppressed.
What this then means is that we get away from equality as the standard to a kind of compensatory justice as the standard. If you think that the rich and the powerful and the smart and the strong have been using their advantaged position to damage or harm the interests of the weaker, then you think it’s perfectly fine in turn to sacrifice the stronger for the sake of the weaker.
Then, once those in the weaker or alienated position realize that have this tool or weapon at their disposal, they demand what they are owed. Also then, people who are in the advantaged groups feel guilty because they’ve been taught to feel guilt about their advantages, whatever they have.
This becomes a very powerful tool for leveraging your position within the institution. You start saying: “No, it’s not enough to say that conservative voices and liberal voices are equal—that they’re all just narratives—and so we should have equal space.” You now say: “No, no, the conservative voices have been dominating our culture, so it’s time for them to shut up for a while. Now we’re only going to hear voices from our side of the equation.”
And it’s not just a matter of let’s do this for fairness and make up for past sins. Rather you see it coming out in the particularly aggressive and ugly form: “You owe us. And anything that you say, because of your group membership, is just evil and depraved. And we can just shut you up, by any means fair or foul.”
MML: It’s an expression of your privilege.
SH: Yes.
MML: And so you must check your privilege. You must use the guilt that you’re talking about, yes?, to question your own thinking and your own right to speak it.
SH: Right. And those who have “privilege” don’t have equal rights anymore. In fact, they should just shut up and go away and be silent.
That, of course, is a power play. But to the extent that it works, it means that your side has more control over the institution, whatever institution you’re talking about.
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Source:
Unedited transcription of nine-minute clip “Understanding Postmodernism—The 3 Stages to Today´s Insanity (Stephen Hicks)”. From full 2016 interview of Stephen R. C. Hicks by Mark Michael Lewis.