172 shaares
- Postmodernism is the belief that thinking about agendas [...] is at least as important as thinking about facts [...] 2. Postmodernists don’t necessarily deny the existence of objective facts. But they find them hard to pin down. [...] [P]ost-modernists would draw the boundary of ‘objectivity’ at “how annoying and ridiculous it would be to argue” rather than as a fundamental feature of the world. This doesn’t deny objective reality as a generator for these kinds of statements. It just urges extreme wariness about claims that any particular human statement captures it perfectly. 3. In practice, practically all of us are postmodernists sometimes. [...] These questions inspired a second range of explanations for New Atheism’s decline: it was no longer useful to people in power. 4. I myself think like a post-modernist every time I see a new study come out saying that priming implicit-associated stereotype-threatened ego-depleting power poses has proven that plumbers are racist. I don’t react with “I guess that proves plumbers are racist”. I react with “Huh, apparently the Two Minutes’ Hate is being directed at plumbers today, I wonder why the Powers are angry at them.” The information content is boring; only the signals it carries about who’s in power and what they want are worth examining. 5. Optimistically, postmodernism isn’t necessarily opposed to rationality: rationality says to believe what is true, and it’s true that people are often trying to manipulate us. Hopelessly optimistically, both groups are engaged in the same project of overcoming bias, just taking different perspectives. - But pessimistically, there’s a risk that postmodernism collapses into people ignoring any facts they disagree with, arguing that facts are just mutable products of hostile power structures trying to perpetuate themselves. And by “pessimistically there’s a risk”, I mean “this has obviously been going on for decades”. Again, I’m not just complaining about lefty professors here. The guiding narrative of Breitbart – that Cultural Marxists have taken over society and are indoctrinating everyone with their own concepts and language in order to make it impossible to think outside their boxes – is postmodernist as hell. Aus den Kommentaren: 1. "Postmodernism isn’t a belief; it’s more of a socio-cultural-historical gestalt. Reducing it to a belief or a system of beliefs would be inaccurate because pomo in art isn’t the same as pomo in literature, pomo in philosophy etc.", 2. "Myself, I’m a postpostmodernist: by now, I have the same attitude towards things like A-F as postmodernists have towards things like 1-6." 3. "It is a lot better to think about postmodernism as a bunch of different theories that were build after WWII and therefore just understand it as an historical label."
