From a 2020 interview:
Jennifer Grossman [34:00]: Speaking of philosophical shifts … it seems to me like right now, we are seeing just like we’re seeing an acceleration in so many other areas, an acceleration in technological change, and acceleration in transitions to different kinds of education. Are you are you seeing an acceleration in the consequences or the results of postmodernism? Do you see what we’re going through right now as connected to some of the historical postmodernism that you’ve talked about?
Stephen Hicks: There definitely is acceleration of lots of cultural trends. So I think that part is right. It’s also the case that lots of things lie relatively dormant when there’s lots of activity under the surface, and then things reach a tipping point and lots of underground, most cultural work then spills out, and things happen very quickly because of that groundwork having been laid.
Yes, postmodernism is a major contributor to where we are right now. I don’t want to over-emphasize postmodernism, because there are other cultural forces—there are lots of people in the United States and around the world who are traditional progressives or traditional leftists, who believe that they are they are being scientific and rational and they’re looking at the evidence and there really is such a thing as truth and justice, and equality is an absolute universal value when we should be, we should be fighting for it. And they believe in all of those things, not on postmodernist grounds, so we have the traditional debates with them about all those issues.
But the new kid on the block—actually, now the not-so-new-kid-on-the-block in philosophical time, is postmodernism, and postmodernism is a skeptical, relativistic movement that brings a very strong adversarial stance toward all aspects of Western civilization, and even more broadly against civilization right itself. If we go back to the 60s, 70s, and 80s, in the last century, when the famous intellectual names are people like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and the American, Richard Rorty, those typically are under the label of post-modernist.
In postmodernism we have a set of views that say reason is not competent to know reality. So it’s a strong skepticism, objectivity is a failed myth, we are all subjective—and that our subjectivity is not an individualistic one, that we are all born into cultural groups that shape us and mold us—that all of those cultural groups have different traditions and different languages and different frameworks—and they’re all in conflict with each other, so all we really are going to have is conflict at various at various levels—but we live in a culture that has these, these myths about objectivity and truth and freedom and equality and so forth—yet really those are just cover stories for powerful people who like to exploit us along various dimensions—so we need to stick it to the Man, to rise up in various revolutionary fashions, and overturn institutions and rip off the mask of the oppressor.
That cartoon version of post modernism, as I have just presented, became enormously influential in the universities and trained a lot a whole generation of professors and others who went on to become journalists and lawyers and teachers. So we have lived through a major cultural shift over the course of the last generation, and the fact is that it’s spilling out into other cultural institutions and into the streets—I do think that post modernism is a is a major form of it.
Now, I want to say that it’s not classic postmodernism, because I think classic post modernism, if I can use that label, is it is a skeptical position that says there are no such things as true stories about the world. And an immediate reaction—If you think there are no true stories about the world, if instead all we have is our subjective narratives—then your immediate position is to say: Well, I can’t say that my viewpoint is any better than your viewpoint, or that my values are any better than anybody else’s values. And that seems to push in the direction of a kind of tolerance, or a kind of live-and-let-live, you do your own thing, and so forth.
But what typically happens—and this partly becomes a psychological point—Is that very few people can live with a radical relativism and radical skepticism—they want to have meaning in their life, they want to be committed to something—and so what typically, they will have, as the second phase is to say: Okay, maybe about my values, I can’t give you a good case for why they are true or objective. But they are my values, damn it. And I want to make a difference in the world. So what postmodernism teaches me is that I should then just make a subjective commitment to whatever I happen to believe and take it to the streets or to whatever forum I have, and roll my sleeves up and be prepared for the bare-knuckle fight out there. So people will find meaning through a subjective, adversarial take-it-to-the-streets commitment, rather than just saying: Well, I guess I just have to put up with everybody just believing their own thing.
The full interview is here:
Related: Jacques Derrida’s “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in the Philosophers Explained series.