The Intellectual Dark Web (Jamie Q Roberts)

The Postmodern Approach to Truth

With the rise of Postmodernism, the veneration of truth, reasoning and evidence came to be seen as old-fashioned, or ‘problematic’, as they say today. There is an amusing 1990s Noam Chomsky video on YouTube about this. Chomsky is not in the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW), yet he has appeared on Lex Fridman’s podcast twice, and his attitude to Postmodernism puts him in the same epistemological ballpark as the IDW; in any case, he’s close enough to earn an appearance in this book. Chomsky talks about two lectures he had recently given: the first at Birzeit University in Palestine, the second at an Israeli university:

As we walked out he [a friend of Chomsky’s] kind of laughed and he told me that most of the especially younger people liked it [the lecture] a lot, but he heard one critical – really critical comment – from a young woman faculty member who sort of liked the general political thrust of it, but told him it was very naïve. And I said, ‘why was it naïve?’ and he laughed and he said, well, it’s because you said that people do things on moral grounds and you talked about truth. And that’s old-fashioned nonsense. That’s kind of this old Enlightenment stuff

… Nobody does anything on moral grounds. It’s all power plays. You know. Read Foucault. And so on and so forth, if you can understand it. And truth is kind of like an old-fashioned concept. You know, there’s no truth … That stuff goes on all over. The next day I gave a talk at an Israeli university … One of the commentators was the dean. And he hated it of course. An historian. He also said it was naïve because I was talking as if there was an objectivity in history.1

The Israelis and Palestinians: politically divided, but united by Postmodernism. lol. Chomsky also says:

there’s a lot of material reward that comes from it [being a Postmodernist] – like if you are part of that system you can run around the conferences, get big professorships, and you know, all this kind of stuff – so there’s a lot of conventional material reward, and it has this very radical look to it.2

So, for Chomsky, Postmodernism = faux radical careerist relativism. I tell ya, shit ain’t changed. I show the Chomsky video to my students to make the point that you can be on the left and still believe in truth, reasoning, and evidence.3

The following is a summary of what, for the IDW, comes under the umbrella of ‘Postmodernism’:

  • Epistemological (and moral) relativism. This refers to the belief that neither truth (nor morality) can be generalised. Related points include:
    • There is little or no human nature (this is known as the ‘blank slate’ view of the human brain).4
  • Denying that we have access to reality. Related points include:
    • Truth claims, or even just language – or ‘discourse’ – do not represent reality, they construct reality to serve the interests of power.5 ·
    • We cannot distinguish between facts and feelings.
    • Science (although not climate science) is just another discourse that serves the interests of power.
  • Identity Politics. ‘Identity Politics’ involves believing that the key elements of a person’s identity are determined by the groups to which he or she purportedly belongs rather than his or her individual characteristics and experiences. Amongst many other things, this can involve thinking that the less power a group has, the greater the group’s access to truth.
  • Being anti-West.
  • Being reluctant to discuss ideas. According to the IDW, for Postmodernists, open discussion is not just unhelpful, it is dangerous because bad discourses perpetuate undesirable power.

Helen Pluckrose articulates many of these points in her appearance on Rebel Wisdom in October 2019:

The main characteristics of it [Postmodernism] are a belief in the cultural constructedness of knowledge. So, knowledge isn’t something that’s out there to be found, it’s something that humans make with their language. And this works in the service of power. So particularly the Postmodern ideas will go against Christianity, but also Marxism, and also Science. They will say these have undue power, they’re accepted as truths, they’re dangerous, and they want to pick them all apart. So, because of that we see understandings of categories that we’ve accepted as distinct, as actually blending into each other – the things like fact and fiction, reason and emotion. We’re not separating these in Postmodernism. There’s that really intense focus on language as dangerous – as a constructor of things. And we’ve got quite a loss of both humanism and individuality. We’re not to see each other as fellow human beings with individual characteristics that we can like, dislike, agree with, disagree with. Now it’s all about knowledge as attached to identity.6

Jordan Peterson, in his first appearance on Rogan in November 2016, identifies similar characteristics:

The Postmodernists – that’s a philosophical community, let’s say – believe that the entire point of human categorisation is power. And that dialogue between people is only a power dialogue. And that there’s no real reality outside of interpretation. And that basically what we do is exchange interpretive viewpoints to ratchet up our dominance and status, and that’s that. Biology is an ideology and the idea of the objective world is an ideology, and science is an ideology.7

There is a much longer story to tell here about how Postmodern ideas and Identity Politics evolved, at least in part, out of Marxist ideas that were articulated over a century ago. The short of it is that Marxism held that how societies produce things – the ‘economic base’ – affects everything from politics to culture – the ‘superstructure’ – and that once the workers gained control of the means of production a better world would be created. Notably, Marxism emphasised collective identity – in its case: class – and was often revolutionary in spirit. Newer Marxist ideas associated with Gramsci and the Frankfurt School increasingly stressed that ideology and culture played a role in maintaining unequal class relations; that is, workers were not just materially oppressed, they were brainwashed. Then, with the rise of Poststructuralism in the 1960s, the Marxist focus on class was replaced by the vaguer concept of ‘power’ (today ‘privilege’ has replaced ‘power’), and ‘ideology’ became ‘discourse’. With Poststructuralism, the materialism of Marxism (worrying about the means of production) was swept away, and even to speak about reality or truth became odious. Yet the Marxist attraction to collectivism and revolutionary, utopian thinking remained. And this is largely where we are now. Where once a better world was to be brought about by the workers seizing the means of production, now a better world will be brought about by those groups who have less privilege transforming discourse.

To give an example of the Postmodern approach to knowledge – just to show that the IDW isn’t making it all up – many points mentioned in this section can be seen in the following run-of-the-mill 2012 Postmodern academic paragraph from International Relations (Postmodernism has colonised every academic field):

The main targets of the ‘reflexive critique’ are positivism’s adherence to ‘truth as correspondence’, its understanding of knowledge as ‘representation’ and its separation of subject and object, and of facts and values. Against these core positivist epistemic stances, the ‘reflexive turn’ was meant to signify IR’s awareness of the historicity of knowledge, and of the inherently normative or ideological nature of IR’s underlying theoretical premises, modes of theorizing and scholarly ethos.8

Here, Postmodernism appears as the ‘reflexive critique’, and ‘positivism’ is the representative of the Enlightenment.

The point of appending ‘reflexive’ to ‘critique’ (beyond the simple pleasure of writing with redundancies and signalling group membership) is to imply that Enlightenment types – ‘positivists’ – are operating at a lower level: they may critique things, but their critiques are not ‘reflexive’ or properly self-aware. For the naïve positivists, then, which includes Marxists, truth claims correspond with things and events in reality; whereas for the superior reflexives, this is not so. The same point is being made by the objection to ‘knowledge as representation’. In both cases, the Postmodern denial that we have access to reality is implied; that is, truth claims do not correspond with something in reality and knowledge does not represent reality. Here also we see grounds for epistemological and moral relativism: if truth and knowledge are not grounded in reality, then we have no basis for elevating one claim above another.

The objection to the positivist separation of subject and object is more of the same. However, it is here that the anti-science flavour becomes stronger. The scientist – the subject – in trying to get to the truth takes care to remove his or her bias to better grasp whatever object he or she is studying. This is the point of science (#theoriginalreflexivecritique). As the oft-quoted Richard Feynman remarks: ‘The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool’.9 But in the Postmodern world, subjectivity cannot be removed (you’d think that at this point the Postmodernists would resign their academic positions and retire to the commune because they cannot justify their salaries). The same claim is being made in the objection that ‘facts’ cannot be separated from ‘values’. It is this point that Ben Shapiro is attacking with his tag line: ‘facts don’t care about your feelings’. The suggestion that knowledge has historicity (quite the word) is yet more of the same, but here we get the sense that knowledge flows from culture or language – from ‘discourse’ – rather than from reality (but if this was true, we ought to call this so-called knowledge ‘opinion’ – but down this path also lies unemployment). A significant implication is that older works do not contain knowledge; rather, they merely reproduce the bigoted ideas of the past. Which is why we don’t need them. Amongst all this, there is also the implication that there is not much point in studying history itself because history has historicity – I encounter very few history buffs amongst the ranks of Postmodern academics.

We can rehash all this, and continue working through the paragraph, using two useful words: is and ought. For Enlightenment types, much of life involves trying to understand what is so that we can better decide how we ought to act.10 For example, we need to know the road rules so that we can figure out how we ought to drive, or a doctor needs to know how the body works so that he or she can operate successfully. In the Postmodern universe, claims about how the world is merely reflect people’s interests about how they wish the world ought to be. This is what is meant by ‘normative’. So, claims about the nature of reality are really just about people trying to get what they want – they are about power. Whence ‘ideological’.

As mentioned by Chomsky, Foucault, one of the major figures in Postmodernism, popularised these ideas – at least in the academic realm – in the 1960s and 1970s. The following remarks from his book Discipline and Punish provide a good sense of Postmodern thinking:

We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.11

The crux of all this is that from the Postmodern perspective, the point is not to try to understand the nature of reality – what is – and then determine what we ought to do based at least in part on what is. Instead, because there is no is, the point is to begin by assuming that you are right and put your energies into changing how people talk and think because whatever passes for reality is constituted in culture, in language, in discourse. Peter Boghossian addresses this problem when speaking at Portland State University on a panel with Heather Heying, Helen Pluckrose, and James Damore. Objecting to ‘activist academics’, he says ‘They think they’ve found the truth, there’s no need to seek it, they are activists. But your epistemology has to come before your activism. Why you are doing activism matters’.12

This brings us to the final point about Postmodernists’ aversion to debate. Back in 2005, International Relations academic John Mearsheimer made the following observation about ‘Post-Cold War idealists’ (his name for ‘Postmodernists’):

Post-Cold War idealists have a different strategy for changing the world [than their Cold War counterparts]. They believe that the master causal variable is discourse, not reason itself. It is not enough to have the better argument [the approach of earlier idealists]; rather, one wins the day by having the only argument. Specifically, they maintain that how we talk and think about the world largely shapes practice.13

These remarks provide a clear sense of what many – not just those in the IDW – are concerned about. In a world without truth or knowledge, in a world where we do not have access to reality, in a world where language conjures reality into existence, there is no place for arguing, just as there is no need to study history or the classics or science. There is only the totalitarian mission of transforming discourse because it is from discourse alone that the ills of the world are derived.

But how does all this actually work? I mean, Postmodernism really doesn’t make sense. For instance, if reality is so hard to discern, then why is it so easy to work out who has power or privilege? And isn’t the whole point to end oppression as it exists in reality? The following is my distillation of what is going on.

As discussed, in Postmodern epistemology, there is no distinction between subject and object, between facts and values. To steel-man Postmodernism, collapsing these distinctions helps to make the entirely reasonable point that sometimes powerful people lie to serve their interests. However, you don’t defeat a liar by saying there is no truth. And this brings us to the real goal of Postmodernism: by collapsing these distinctions, a sinister yet elegant reversal becomes possible. If subject cannot be separated from object, if facts cannot be separated from values, then the Postmodernist himself or herself is justified in treating his or her own feelings, intuitions, hypotheses, and so on, as if they were facts – as if they were knowledge. Thus, the tool that was putatively developed to undermine the powerful is now used to protect the power of Postmodernists. This is the Postmodern sleight of hand. But what kind of a world is it if we cannot speak truth to power – if we can only speak power to power? It is a world of chaos. 

Jordan Peterson makes similar points in his appearance with Bret Weinstein on Rogan in September 2017, when talking about the student mob at Evergreen State College:

Part of the reason that the only thing that the Postmodernists believe in is power is because that helps them justify their arbitrary use of it under any circumstances whatsoever … So it’s not surprising that you see this manifested in that mob-like behaviour of the students. It’s right in accordance with everything they’re being taught.14

So much more could be said about the battle between Enlightenment and Postmodern approaches to truth.15 But I will limit myself to a couple more remarks. While Postmodernism has its uses – culture can be propaganda – it is, ultimately, just another form of corrupt power. Corrupt power always works the same way: once it has been attained it wants to be unaccountable. Consider that one of the (now) amusing things the Bolsheviks did when they gained power following the 1917 Russian revolution was to ban unions. Why would workers need a mechanism to fight for their interests when the Bolsheviks were the party of the workers?

I’ve been quite black and white in this section. There are a range of intensities with which Postmodernism is practiced. For example, more moderate Postmodernists can be upbeat about our ability to discern reality; however, their Postmodern inclinations are revealed in, say, an aversion to weighing positives and negatives about a phenomenon. I regularly encounter this with colleagues’ and students’ deep contempt for the West (except Postmodernism). They will provide evidence to demonstrate that the West is bad – and sometimes it is good evidence – but they will bristle if asked to weigh pros and cons. I also regularly encounter the ‘blank slate’ view of the human mind in everything from Constructivism in International Relations (for Constructivists, the international realm will be transformed by changing norms) to the idea that never dies: gender is a social construction (though this construction rarely seems to be so odious that the person asserting it has abandoned trying to look attractive in conventional ways). 

Further IDW Objections to Postmodernism & Its Heirs

On Sam Harris’s podcast in January 2018 (titled ‘The Intellectual Dark Web’ – it is on this episode that Eric Weinstein coined the name ‘Intellectual Dark Web’), in talking about what bothers him most about the times, Ben Shapiro makes a clear critique of the relativism that lies at the heart of Postmodernism. He laments the loss of ‘human reason’ and ‘objective truths’, both of which he claims have been replaced by ‘radical subjectivism’. He says:

[People will] toss reason out altogether. They’ll say your specific bias as a person prevents you from even having a reasonable conversation. Your white privilege or your background or your ethnicity – all of this prevents us from even discussing on a one-on-one level. I can recognise my background having an impact on how I think. But if that is supposed to be a conversation stopper, then how exactly are we supposed to have a conversation?16

Here, Shapiro finds a useful middle ground. He concedes that background affects what we think but indicates that this does not prevent us from working together to get to the truth. Harris provides a pithy paraphrase of Shapiro’s remarks, saying, ‘That’s why Identity Politics is so toxic, in my view. Because if identity is paramount, communication is impossible’.17

Jonathan Haidt makes a point that is similar to Boghossian’s previously mentioned remarks about ‘activist academics’. Haidt objects to ‘motivated scholarship’ and states that if a scholar wants to undertake research to support his or her political agenda, then he or she will almost always succeed.18 He argues that ‘motivated scholars’ succeed because the mechanisms of ‘institutionalised disconfirmation’ – typically peer review – aren’t working. This is because parts of academia are now dominated by scholars who share the same political views and who uncritically support one another’s work (seems we need to be more critical of the reflexive critique). In making these arguments, he presents data that demonstrate American universities are increasingly dominated by left-wing scholars. Haidt says all of this not because he is on the right – he votes Democrat – but because, once again, he thinks that truth should be the goal or telos of universities. Haidt, invoking standard Enlightenment ideas, says that humans are ‘biased and flawed and often shallow and silly […] but when we push against each other we challenge each other and we get better – we get smarter – together’. He then makes his key argument: ‘On this view of human nature, on this view of intellectual life, a university must have viewpoint diversity and it dies – it dies – if it has political orthodoxy and a monoculture’.19 The point is that the Postmodern sleight-of-hand helps to support the political monoculture by generally weakening standards.

Steven Pinker made a compatible critique of the left 20 years ago (Pinker himself could be IDW ‘patient zero’ rather than Douglas Murray – but where do we stop with such things: Richard Dawkins? Christopher Hitchens?). Early in The Blank Slate, Pinker presents a range of ‘blank-slate’ claims that he deems ‘preposterous’. He then writes:

This is the mentality of a cult, in which fantastical beliefs are flaunted as proof of one’s piety. That mentality cannot coexist with an esteem for the truth, and I believe it is responsible for some of the unfortunate trends in recent intellectual life.20

The only significant shift between then and now, and arguably one of the reasons why the IDW became prominent, is that the ‘unfortunate trends in recent intellectual life’ Pinker speaks about are no longer limited to esoteric academia. They now underpin the excesses of the left in the Culture Wars and can be found throughout the organs of Western society, including governments, schools, and corporations.

Bret Weinstein makes this point at the end of Michael Nayna’s documentary about the Evergreen State College incident. In Weinstein’s remarks, we also see the concern that the Postmodern turn is a civilisation-level threat:

I keep being invited to talk about free speech on college campuses and every time I’m invited I make the same point, which is this isn’t about free speech and this is only tangentially about college campuses. This is about a breakdown in the basic logic of civilisation and it’s spreading, and college campuses may be the first dramatic battle but of course this is going to find its way into the courts. It’s already found its way into the tech sector. It’s going to find its way to the highest levels of governance if we are not careful. And it actually does jeopardise the ability of civilisation to continue to function…. These ideas [which are all related to Postmodernism] were wrong when they first took hold in the academy. And instead of shutting them down, we created phony fields that act as a kind of analytical affirmative action where ideas that do not deserve to survive are given sustenance. These ideas are so toxic and so ill-conceived that to the extent they are allowed to hold sway as if one truth is equal to every other truth, right, my truth is as good as your truth, to the extent that that idea is allowed to pervade other institutions on which civilisation depends, civilisation will come apart, so we have to fight this, and don’t get the sense that it is just about college campuses or kids overacting because, um, that ain’t what this is. This is far more important.21

***

This is an extract from The Intellectual Dark Web by Jamie Q Roberts.  

Challenging the restrictive and relativistic intellectual and cultural orthodoxies on the left that engulfed universities, the media, and big tech in the 2010s, the Intellectual Dark Web – a loose collective of politically diverse intellectuals, commentators, and scholars critical of political correctness, identity politics, and cancel culture – relied on alternative platforms like podcasts, digital magazines, and YouTube to advocate for free speech, universal rights, and individual liberty.

Notes

  1. Chomsky’s Philosophy 2015 September 13: 0:02:06.
  2. Chomsky’s Philosophy 2015 September 13: 0:00:55.
  3. Postmodernism today isn’t quite the same as what it was in the 1990s. While its relativism and focus on language and power has been retained, in its newer Social Justice incarnation, there is a little less obscurantist language. Helen Pluckrose discusses this on the Rebel Wisdom (Rebel Wisdom 2019 October 7: 0:03:00) and in greater depth in her and James Lindsay’s book, Cynical Theories (2021).
  4. Several IDW figures come from fields that are founded in the belief that human nature exists. Core figures Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, and associate Richard Dawkins are Evolutionary Biologists. Gad Saad is an Evolutionary Psychologist. A foundational IDW discussion about human nature occurs between Bret Weinstein and Jordan Peterson on The Joe Rogan Experience 2017 September 1.
  5. Helen Joyce, author of the book, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, says the following about Postmodernism’s emphasis on language on Jordan Peterson’s podcast: ‘[In the Postmodern turn], the language takes precedence over the bedrock material itness of things’ (Jordan B Peterson 2022 September 13: 0:04:48). Andrew Doyle, speaking on the Triggernometry podcast, says the following about the link between the various strands of Identity Politics and Postmodernism: I see it as a kind of hydra – with many heads – because you’ve got a strand about race, gender – and all these things are different. Critical Race Theory is very different from Queer theory, say, but they all come from the same well-spring. They all come from the same fundamental Postmodern assumptions that, for instance, our understanding of reality is constructed through the language that we use. That’s why they are all obsessed with language and the manipulation of language (Triggernometry 2022 September 8: 0:40:08).
  6. Rebel Wisdom 2019 October 7: 0:00:31.
  7. The Joe Rogan Experience 2016 November 28: 0:04:01.
  8. Hamati-Ataya 2012: 671.
  9. Feynman 1974.
  10. We should keep in mind that some oughts cannot be derived from what is. But this is a deeper philosophical discussion.
  11. Foucault 1991 [1975]: 194.
  12. Freethinkers of PSU 2018 February 26: 0:39:18. IDW associate Matt Taibbi also speaks about this phenomenon. Impersonating the orthodox-left position he says, ‘We’ve decided something, right? We’re not going to discuss it anymore.’ Then critiquing this he says: ‘So if you discuss it, you’re in the bad zone … There are just so many of these places in the cultural landscape that are no fly zones.’ Taibbi mentions this in relation to discussing Transgender issues and also the ‘Lab Leak Hypothesis’; the latter refers to the possibility that the COVID-19 virus escaped from a lab – for a period in 2020 and 2021 it was taboo to mention this. 2021 December 7: 1:17:45.
  13. Mearsheimer 2005: 145.
  14. The Joe Rogan Experience 2017 September 1: 0:04:32.
  15. Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s book Cynical Theories provides an extensive treatment of the battle, as do many parts of Pinker’s The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of our Nature and Enlightenment Now.
  16. Sam Harris 2018 January 6: 0:16:10.
  17. Harris 2018 January 6: 0:18:15.
  18. Gravitahn 2016 December 6: 0:04:12.
  19. Gravitahn 2016 December 6: 0:00:34. More recently, Steven Pinker made the same points: Academia in particular has become notorious for having a political monoculture increasingly, especially in Humanities faculties and Science faculties and Public Health faculties. There are fewer and fewer people who would call themselves a Conservative or even Centrists. It’s moving inexorably leftward. Unless you believe that the left has the truth about everything. In which case we don’t need science. Just ask a left-wing pundit. And we have the answer. If you don’t believe that, you are committed to the idea that we need diversity of ideas, of viewpoints. Not just diversity of gonads and skin colour. But diversity of beliefs. The most important kind of diversity there is (Big Think 2023 March 23: 0:27:27).
  20. Pinker 2019 [2002]: x.
  21. Michael Nayna 2019 April 24: 0:22:11.

Jamie Q Roberts is a political philosopher, musician, writer and builder of artscapes (it’s a long story). He lectures politics and international relations at Sydney University. He believes that beauty that endures contains the true and the good; whence his interest in the classics.