—Odysseus
The Wall Street Journal, on August 9, 2012, questioned whether or not this presidency is the first “postmodern” presidency. In the article, they went on to define “postmodernism” as essentially “the literary theory that rejects objective reality and insists instead that everything is a matter of interpretation and relative ‘truth.'” It then goes on to note that, “[Obama is] running the first postmodern Presidential campaign, now organized almost exclusively around allegations about his opponent that bear no relation to the observable universe.”
Indeed, after the Democratic Party convention, we see that significant segments of American society conduct themselves along the “postmodern” viewpoint as an ideology. We would posit that “postmodernism” is an extension of the larger “progressive” project to reject western civilization in all its aspects. “Postmodernism” is an attack on the most basic building block, the last bastion of western civilization. We would suggest that the progressive critique of western civilization began with accurately spotting the deep moral flaws embodied in the general acceptance of slavery by most of the world. Once slavery was overcome and newly accepted as “immoral,” thereby proving that a single long held aspect of western civilization could have been so utterly wrong, all other “accepted knowledge” also came into question. Infallibility of tradition being ruptured, everything else came into question as well.
The progressive tradition is one wherein the “perfect” is made the enemy of the “good.” If racism is a long held part of “traditional wisdom,” then all other “traditional wisdom” is not only suspect, but rather automatically wrong. The progressives’ failure is one of essential hubris. They believe that they can re-organize all of human culture, systems, and the evolution of those structures to come up with something that is “better.” They think that, by sitting down with a bottle of wine and “brainstorming” for a couple of hours, they can create a more functional society than six thousand years of human effort before the arrival of their magnificence in smelly diapers. The progressive ethos found a natural home within the largest historical collection of human vanity, and, thereby, reached its apogee with the arrival of the “baby boomer” generation. To understand why “postmodernism” is such a perfect fit for this group, one has to place them into their historical and psychological context.
World War II devastated most of the industrial world. The former colonial powers were monetarily bankrupt, psychologically crushed, and physically destroyed over the course of the war. One industrial power had surviving manpower, intact factories, and mental confidence when the dust settled, and that was the United States of America. American factories, workers, universities, banks, and companies resupplied and rebuilt the entire world. In essence, the United States became the “colonial power” for much of the rest of the planet. While the Soviet Union competed for this role, it never really came close to the utter economic dominance achieved by the United States. Consequently, the United States became the richest society in the history of the planet. The United States was so wealthy that every level of society was lifted like all boats in a rising tide. The standard of living for the lowliest worker in America made him live like a prince compared to most other countries. These wealthy, prosperous Americans did what every wealthy man does, he devoted his resources to making his children have an easier life than he had suffered.
These children were the “baby boomers.” The phenomenon whereby the scion of a wealthy man grows up self-indulgent and indolent is well know, and has been dubbed by wags a disease called “affluenza.” The boomers spent their childhood in comfort. Their entire society was well-ordered, affluent, and safe. They had little understanding of their harsh parents whose rules, lessons, and statements seemed to reflect a harder, meaner world that they could neither see nor imagine. They were told by every source of information—schools, television, movies, newspapers, parents, teachers, and clergy—that America was the ideal society. They were told that we had achieved the pinnacle of technological and social harmony, that everything was headed in the right direction. As children, the boomers lived in a simple, black-and-white world where the only thing to fear was “the bad guys” (the USSR).
As the Eisenhower era drew to a close, America took note of the unequal treatment of blacks in America. The legacy of slavery that had plagued the aspirations of the founders returned to haunt the conscience of the polity. Setting aside for our purposes here the role of the US and Soviet global propaganda efforts, America’s experience with the Nazis had proven to us that racism and separate treatment of a country’s own citizens was both morally indefensible and could poison whole societies. However, the role of the “negro” and the commonly-held beliefs about him were so deeply ingrained in American society and, indeed, western civilization, that re-imagining society without that stigma required what seemed to many a fundamental shift in our foundations. Making that change was needlessly traumatic because the concepts of absolute liberty at birth, the concept that all men are created equal, was already fundamental to our national character. It simply required applying those principles to the black man as well as the white one. However, the realization that so much of our society had been utterly wrong about something so basic shook the faith of the “precious” boomer children, for whom everything had to be exactly right all the time. Their simplistic world made no allowance for fallibility and, like the rigidity of the Roman Catholic structures before the original Martin Luther, a small hiccup in application was treated as an enormous earthquake in the firmament.
The fact that we needed to acknowledge and edit our society to bring us more in line with our own ideology made the boomers throw a tantrum called the “counter-culture.” If their parents had been wrong about the Negro, then they were wrong about everything. They rebelled against their parents’ silly rules and morals and lessons which they had never had to fully grasp in their consequence-free childhoods. Finding a mistake in their parents’ ideology became the permission they needed to act out. They wanted to break every rule and then go seeking for new “rules” to break. Anything that had a slight whiff of “tradition” to their sensitive noses was subject to attack and ridicule. The roles of men and women in society, manner of dress, length of hair, manner of “manners,” expectations of decorum, dignity or individual responsibility all were to be rejected. They gave little or no thought to the fact that all of these structures, values, manners, and expectations were created, modified, and carefully tailored over millennia to achieve a purpose. These were not random affectations, but, rather, instrumentalities developed to improve the lives of most humans and smooth their interactions with one another. These were things discovered and promulgated to reduce disease, prevent accidents, spare injured feelings, and gentle our societies. Western civilization’s expectations and methods had made it the most successful way of life in the world; so much so that other cultures were emulating the western way in order to succeed in the modern world (cf. Japan, Ataturk’s Ottoman Empire, India’s professional class, etc). Rather than being willing to build upon or improve the discoveries or social developments of Western Civilization, the “counter-culture progressives” wanted to overthrow everything and, in their vanity, believed they could utterly replace it.
In rejecting everything valued by their fathers, the narcissistic generation went on to embrace everything that was not a product of their successful fathers whose achievements they knew they could never match. They looked to any and every non-western civilization as intrinsically “superior”. They embraced these societies uncritically simply because they were “different.” Native American, African, Muslim, Far Eastern, Sub-Continent Hindu Indian, it did not matter. Anything and everything was assumed to be superior to the Western Civilization of their fathers which they were working so hard to reject. The most striking thing about this embrace and “slobbering love affair” was how uncritical it was. The civilizations and cultures that were to be emulated were the very antithesis of the liberties for which these libertines claimed to advocate. The cultures from Africa, the Far East, India etc., were extraordinarily racist, chauvinist, violent, intolerant, murderous, doctrinaire, theocratic, and rigid. Even when literally violently attacked, these “progressives” would try to find some way to excuse and apologize for their own victimizers. The Left acts with, as Orianna Fallaci described after the events of September 11, 2001, “penitential narcissism that makes the West guilty of even that which victimizes it.” These cultures were the extreme embodiment of pernicious ideas that the liberal western civilization was subsuming, yet the counter-culture progressives desperately pretended to have common cause with them in preference to the gentler western civilization that gave life to the very ideas the progressives espoused. Mere opposition to their fathers’ civilization was apparently more important than all other causes they claimed as their motivation.
The boomers made being “spoiled brats” into an ideology of itself, a “rejectionism” that fit nicely into “postmodernism.” For what is “postmodernism” but the very concept that “modernity” can be superseded and a syllogism as terrifyingly humorous as the Nazis and Fascists’ proposition that democracy made people less free than a dictatorship. The fundamental tenet of “postmodernism” was to challenge Western Civilization’s very first discovery. This challenged the cornerstone upon which all of civilization has been built, that there is such a thing as “objective truth.”
The first great discovery of Western Civilization (the Greeks) was that truth is not relative. It exists irrespective of any opinion, desire, belief or recollection. There is an objective reality to the world. One has to acknowledge that events truly happen in a certain way even though different viewers may perceive them differently. One has to acknowledge that there is an objective reality before one can begin the process of ascertaining its laws or even making rational decisions about what actions can be taken to address events, issues or planning. Even though our analysis of “the laws of physics” or “events that occurred” may be flawed, it is a worthy attempt to apply our best methods to ascertain objective reality in order that we may draw lessons and perform better in the future. If one cannot, at least, adhere to that understanding, then all attempts at improvement or discovery are impossible.
“Postmodernism” and its “progressive” acolytes, therefore, reject the foundation on which any human advancement can succeed. They subvert the efforts of the rational and the brain to the animal impulses of the “heart.” They are only interested in what feels good, despite any accumulation of evidence to the contrary. This is on display in any speech or proclamation by a “progressive” or Leftist; the literal truth of a situation or event is scarcely relevant. They are trying to make what they consider to be a “greater point” as said by Jimmy Carter in his last error-filled book about the Middle East peace process during the Clinton years, which caused the director of the Carter Institute to resign in disgust. To them, the truth is an instrument to be warped or manipulated in service to an agenda that feels good to their “heart.” Their world is one of ultimate subjectivity where they, in their hubris, feel free to push an agenda, unconstrained by others’ beliefs, long-held human knowledge or even reality so long as they, themselves, approve of it.
This abandonment of objective reality, along with the abandonment of the other successful elements of western civilization, have become the rallying cry of the modern Left. They seek out ever more exotic causes in their quest to rage against their fathers. The “boomers” may now be old with thinning gray hair and sagging bodies, but, with age, has not come wisdom. These narcissistic children are internally still hippies, raging against the value of their dead and dying parents. It is humorously still on display as they parade around dressed as human vaginas along with any gullible children they can dupe into following their empty ideology of mere opposition for opposition’s sake. However, the final results are not humorous at all. These “progressive” rejectionists of “modernism” are rejecting civilization itself. They offer nothing workable in its place, merely reheated ideologies that have already been proven failures or retrograde, such as “communism” or the savagery that permeates the third world. Paul Ryan spoke with surgical precision when he noted that they want to implement the ideas that people have come to America to escape. What would it be like to be “postmodern?” What comes after “modern?” What comes after “advanced?” What comes after “development?” These questions boil down to one question that sums up the many. What comes after “civilization?” The answer to that question is “the primitive.” The stone-age cultures they idealize will not be so pleasant to actually live in.
