Dare to know! That is the motto of enlightenment.
—Immanuel Kant, 1784
Today’s campus protests share many similarities with those of the 1960s. But something is weirdly different. To me, that difference seems best captured by the Yale student’s rant:
Being a master [of Silliman College] … is not about creating an intellectual space! It is not! It’s about creating a home here. You are not doing that!
This undergraduate is literally screaming to have the university supply her with an ultra-protective parent. Unthinkable. In the 1960s, the point of college was to get out on our own, think for ourselves and escape anything that seemed the least bit paternalistic. “Don’t trust anyone over 30” was our mantra. But this is not a generational issue; this is an identity politics issue that affects those of any generation who subscribe to postmodern identity politics.
The “anti-racist” protests on the Evergreen College campus, perhaps the most “progressive” campus in America, were instigated by a joint faculty-administrative committee. And then there was the microaggression fatwa handed down to the entire University of California system from its president.
Although some students are willing accomplices, the real instigators now hide in faculty offices. They, not the students, are truly the snowflakes sitting in safe spaces while their students, social justice warriors, protect them by harassing faculty who have not drunk this postmodern Kool-Aid.
I won’t explore the tactics used for intra-departmental warfare. But note that most academic identity politics is associated with “critical theories”—critical race theory, critical feminist theory, critical gender theory, critical legal theory and such. “Critical Theory,” as it happens, is a neo-Marxist, Frankfurt-School system of thought that “seeks to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them.”
So, postmodern professors see themselves as political activists seeking to free the enslaved minds of their students and colleagues. With such a noble calling, much can be justified. Meanwhile, normal academics are focused on their research and don’t put up much of a fight. Recall from Chapter 33 that Judith Butler, whom we will soon meet again, was given $1.5 million by the Mellon Foundation to fund a critical theory institute.
But to better understand this takeover of higher education’s soft underbelly, we need to explore the ideas and strategies of those who launched this modern, anti-Enlightenment counterrevolution.
Postmodern Godfathers
Two highly controversial philosophers, Nietzsche and Heidegger, inspired Foucault and Derrida, the two most well-known postmodernists. I will introduce these four, plus three postmodernists—de Man, Lyotard and Lacan—who I selected from among the first tier. Here’s the list:
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844−1900): German philosopher and uber-elitist. A Nazi favorite.
- Martin Heidegger (1889−1976): German Nazi philosopher.
- Michel Foucault (1926−1984): French historian who preferred torture to prisons.
- Jacques Derrida (1930−2004): French philosopher of deconstruction who opposed logical argument.
- Paul de Man (1919−1983): Belgian literary critic, con man, and promoter of Jacques Derrida.
- Jean-François Lyotard (1924−1998): French anti-science philosopher.
- Jacques Lacan (1901−1981): French psychoanalyst and pseudo-mathematical charlatan.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Michel Foucault, now the most influential of the postmodern godfathers, claimed that Nietzsche influenced him more profoundly than any other philosopher.
Hitler gave a copy of Nietzsche’s works to Mussolini, and some crypto-fascists love Nietzsche. But Nietzsche wasn’t a fascist. Fascism is a kind of right-wing populism, and Nietzsche was an elitist. A close friend of Franz Liszt and the Wagners, his favorite Übermenschen (Supermen) were Goethe and Beethoven. But that does not begin to scratch the surface of his elitism.
In 1859, Darwin disrupted the philosophical world with his concept of evolution. That transformed Nietzsche’s philosophy. He became convinced that man had evolved, and God had nothing to do with it. “God,” he proclaimed, “is dead … and those born after us … shall be part of a higher history.” What would that look like?
The European Great-Godfathers of the new identity politics
Top: the philosophers, Bottom: the neo-Marxists
The “New Party of Life,” according to Nietzsche, “would tackle … the breeding of humanity to a higher species, including the merciless extirpation of everything that is degenerating and parasitic.” Life would be organized into three castes: Olympian men, guardians, and laborers.
Somehow, everyone would be ranked and assigned according to his “quantum of power and the abundance of his will.” He elaborated: “We must agree to the cruel-sounding truth that slavery belongs to the essence of culture … the wretchedness of struggling men must grow still greater in order to make possible the production of a world of art for a small number of Olympian men.”
As for feminism, try this Nietzschean gem: “Man shall be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior. All else is folly. … Thou goest to woman? Do not forget thy whip.” Has there ever been a more despicable “philosophy”?
The European Godfathers of the new identity politics
Top: the originals, Bottom: second generation
Michel Foucault
Turn now to Foucault, both because he was inspired by Nietzche and because he is the most influential postmodernist. He is mentioned the most in academic articles and in Google searches. In fact, he is mentioned more than “postmodernism” itself.
For Nietzsche, “the test of truth” is “the feeling of power.” Foucault’s view is similar: “Truth is linked in a circular relation with systems of power.” More often, Foucault speaks of “knowledge” rather than “truth,” so his famous concept is “power-knowledge.”
Foucault may be wrong when he interprets Nietzsche as saying that “all knowledge rests upon injustice” and that “the instinct for knowledge is malicious.” But Foucault accepts these views, which lead him to see power-knowledge as concentrated in “the carceral network”—“prisons, factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons.”
Compare that to the progressive view that we should “speak truth to power” because truth is the antidote to power, which often hides the truth. In Foucault’s view, it’s the other way around. Knowledge/truth hides power, so truth is “malicious.”
Better feudalism than Enlightenment. Under feudalism, Foucault believes “knowledge” (he means something like a myth that obscures power since he doesn’t believe in true knowledge) was absent, so raw power was exposed. He supports this view in Discipline and Punish (1975) which disparages the Enlightenment because it substituted prisons for torture. Yes, you read that right.
To make this point, Foucault contrasts pairs of anecdotes, one from the Enlightenment with one from feudalism. Discipline and Punish opens with such a pair. A spectacular and horrifying torture-execution in Paris in March 1757 is contrasted with a timetable for the House of Young Prisoners from 1838. Foucault implies that the regimen of the timetable is worse for young prisoners than execution by torture.
His ally and close friend, Gilles Deleuze, tells us that in this work, the scenes of torture are “lovingly rendered.” Foucault, he says, “always managed to illustrate his theatrical analyses in a vivid manner”—“the red on red of the tortured inmates contrasts with the grey on grey of prison.”
Foucault found the idea of torture so attractive that he decorated his college dormitory room with images of torture from the Napoleonic Wars. From the early 1950s, he practiced sadomasochism. He frequented sadomasochistic bathhouses in San Francisco in the 1980s and praised sadomasochistic activity in interviews with the gay press. Once, when hit by a car, he thought he would die but described the sensation as one of intense pleasure.
But it was only in the last few years of his life that he publicly revealed this side of his personality. Before that, he was one of the main proponents of “the death of the author,” the concept that we should not look at the author of a work when interpreting it. You can see why. Examining his “philosophy” in light of his personal preferences would quickly call it into question.
Case closed. I am not saying that he was a dreadful person or that he said nothing worthwhile. But his politics are not to be trusted.
Why Foucault Matters. Foucault has been a darling of the radical left since the beginning of the anti-psychiatry movement in the late 1960s and is currently the most influential postmodernist, bar none. His ideas have undoubtedly lent force to the misguided “New Jim Crow” myth.
When Ta-Nahisi Coates, in an Atlantic blog post from 2012, listed authors he has read, the only author he said he loved was Michel Foucault. When Coates talks about the “carceral state,” I would lay good odds that he got that from Foucault. I’m sure that neither Coates nor most of Foucault’s fans imbibe much of his distorted view, but even a little is likely too much.
Foucault’s theory of universal control by invisible power-knowledge feeds left and right conspiracy theories, similar to The Matrix and The Deep State.
Foucault’s attitude towards power and his view that when it comes to prison reform we should “question the social and moral distinctions between the innocent and the guilty” reinforce calls to abolish the police and ICE. Foucault’s politics are perfect for a get-out-the-vote campaign—if you’re working for Trump.
Martin Heidegger
Despite being a dues-paying Nazi from 1933 to 1945 (card number 312589), Heidegger was the primary source of philosophical inspiration for Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of Western philosophy, the very foundation of postmodernism.
“The Jews, with their marked gift for calculating,” Heidegger wrote, “have lived for the longest time according to the principle of race, which is why they are resisting its consistent application with utmost violence.” After the war, he never admitted to the existence of the Holocaust.
He told his students, “Let not theories and ‘ideas’ be the rules of your being. The Führer himself and he alone is German reality and its law.” To a colleague, he wrote: “The individual, wherever he stands, counts for nothing. The fate of our people in their State is everything.”
He wrote to a friend in 1974 saying, “Europe is being ruined from below with ‘democracy.’” This was a direct result of Heidegger’s life-long, anti-Enlightenment philosophy.
Jacques Derrida
Derrida’s “deconstruction” was even more complete than Heidegger’s “destruction” (destruktion) of Western philosophy. And Derrida picked up his antipathy towards “Logocentrism”—a focus on logical argument—from Heidegger.
When Derrida died in 2004, The New York Times wrote, “No thinker in the last 100 years had a greater impact than he did on people in more fields and different disciplines.” Sadly, that could be true in America. But the French saw it differently. When 600 French intellectuals were asked in 1981 to name the three most influential living French intellectuals, Derrida’s name was not even mentioned. Meanwhile, in American literary-criticism departments, his popularity was skyrocketing.
When Heidegger and Nazism was published in 1987, the postmodernists circled their wagons around Heidegger with Derrida as his principal defender. Derrida attributed Heidegger’s support for Hitler to a misguided “metaphysical humanism,” which he thought Heidegger corrected by 1938 (while he was still paying Nazi dues).
The main postmodern excuse for relying on Heidegger’s philosophy is that it is completely separate from his Nazism. But this contradicts Derrida’s view, which blamed his Nazism on an error in his philosophy. Shouldn’t Heidegger’s philosophy, if it had any value, have led Heidegger to at least admit the Holocaust happened?
Derrida’s main postmodern contribution, however, was to provide the first “proof” of Nietzsche’s claim that “There are no facts, only interpretations.” This was the purpose of his deconstructionism. His proof contradicts itself, however, because Derrida claims to prove, in effect, that it is a fact that there are no facts.
The damage done by Heidegger/Derrida and their rejection of the Enlightenment, which leaves nothing of value in its place, is immense and continuing.
Paul de Man
Paul de Man began promoting Jacques Derrida in 1971 from his perch in Yale’s Department of Comparative Literature. Eventually, de Man became chairman of the department. From there, deconstructionism took over nearly every literature department in the U.S.
But four years after de Man’s death, it was learned that he had published more than 100 articles in Le Soire, a newspaper that had been seized by the Nazis. He had also worked for two other Nazi-era, German-controlled media companies. After the war, all three media companies were found treasonous, as was his uncle Henri de Man, who served as Prime Minister of Belgium for a year under the Nazi occupation. Henri was a father figure to Paul de Man.
De Man fled to the U.S. in 1948 and was prosecuted in Belgium in absentia. He was found guilty on 16 counts of fraud, forgery, and swindling, and sentenced to five years in prison. In the process, he nearly bankrupted his father and became a lifelong fugitive.
He soon conned his way into a teaching position at Bard College, where he married one of his students without letting on that he had sent his Belgian wife and two children to Argentina.
After de Man’s Nazi connection became known, Derrida performed a deconstructionist reading of de Man’s most anti-Semitic and collaborationist texts and claimed they were anti-fascist. He then concluded that those who denounced de Man’s collaboration were applying Nazism’s “exterminating gesture” to de Man. Yes, to excuse de Man’s Nazi collaboration, he compared exposing de Man to the Holocaust!
Deconstruction, you see, can “prove” anything. As the French had figured out, Derrida was a con man. Paul de Man, his chief promoter, was worse.
Jean-François Lyotard
Jean-François Lyotard was thrilled to learn that the Conseil des Universités of Quebec had asked him to produce a report on the state of knowledge in the Western world.
What had been bugging Lyotard and other postmodernists was that their horse, Marxism, had lost the race so decisively that the other horse, the Enlightenment, looked sure to win. But Lyotard had the answer: “Metanarratives are not credible.” That view he defined as postmodernism—a hip term previously applied only to art and architecture.
Marxism is a “metanarrative”—a grand collection of stories about how societies always evolve—and it had already been sent to the “dustbin of history.”
Lyotard’s target was the Enlightenment—and its crown jewel, science. Science, he said, couldn’t legitimatize itself. “What we have here is a process of delegitimation fueled by the demand for legitimation itself … There is no other proof that the rules are good than the consensus of the experts.” Not trusting experts, he recommended himself instead and decided the rules of science were not legitimate.
Lyotard never noticed what actually proves science is legitimate—it works! For example, Fleming discovered in 1928 that penicillin kills some bacteria and logically concluded it might cure some diseases. It worked. Because it worked, it became part of science.
Ironically, postmodernism’s view of science is exactly backward. The problem is not that science is stuck in ambiguities and circular logic. The real problem is that it’s so good at its job that it often gives humanity powers we are not ready for.
Lyotard’s nonsense wouldn’t matter, except that 40 years later his anti-science has spread through the new “identity politics,” and it makes the Democrats look a little bit ridiculous. For example …
Time out for some performativity. Lyotard tells us that in science, “the goal is no longer truth, but performativity.” So now we find Professor Judith Butler of Harvard and U.C. Berkeley defining “gender” to be purely “performative.”
We act as if being a man or being a woman is actually an internal reality or something that is simply a fact about us.
Yes, most of us do.
But actually, it’s a phenomenon that is being produced all the time and reproduced all the time.
I perform as a male and have a Y chromosome. That’s just a coincidence?
So to say gender is performative is to say that nobody really is a gender from the start.
Nobody? Get out of here! Maybe true for you.
I know it’s controversial, but that’s my claim.
Controversial, yes—a necessary postmodern career move.
Butler claims that no part of gender is determined biologically. Gender, she says, is just a set of performances passed from generation to generation. Pure codswallop!
She might benefit from a stroll up to the botanical garden behind her university. There she could watch a male hummingbird perform his death-defying courtship dives at speeds exceeding 45 mph only to make a U-turn at the last second to display his brilliant gorget precisely in front of the female. Next, Butler should ask a biologist if this natural-seeming masculine gender behavior is “culturally constructed” or might there be some other explanation?
Oh, wait, that would be sc**nce. Scientists just make up the fact that gender performance is hugely correlated with sex in every vertebrate species. Well, not really. And we all know that for humans, society also plays a role; nothing new about that.
Foucault felt no strong need to explain his attraction to torture because it fit his personal psychology, and a similar observation suggests itself for Butler. She seems to feel no need to examine evidence for innate attraction to the opposite sex. Might this be because, as a lesbian, she has not experienced it?
Now, back to Lyotard. Eight years after the publication of Lyotard’s report, The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard came clean in an interview for the Italian magazine, Lotta Poetica:
I referred to a number of books I’d never read. Apparently, it impressed people. It’s all a bit of a parody … I wanted to say first that it’s simply the worst of my books, they’re almost all bad, but that one’s the worst … it belongs to the satirical genre.”
Judith Butler seems not to have understood Lyotard’s satirical performance.
Jacques Lacan
Lacan, a member of the postmodernist inner circle, was a surrealist before becoming a Freudian psychoanalyst. When he was disbarred as a Freudian in 1953, he began mixing abstract math jargon with his psychoanalytic theories.
We find him lecturing in 1970: “One can show that a cut on a torus corresponds to the neurotic subject, and on a cross-cut surface to another sort of mental disease.” For the record, a torus is a mathematical shape like an inner tube.
“May I ask,” begged audience-member Harry Woolf, “if this fundamental arithmetic and this topology are not a myth or merely at best an analogy?”
Lacan responded with a large helping of topo-psycho gibberish and finished it off with: “This torus really exists and it is exactly the structure of the neurotic. It is not an analogon (sic); it is not even an abstraction, because an abstraction is some sort of diminution of reality, and I think it is reality itself.” I love math, but no, a neurotic does not, in reality, have the exact structure of an inner tube. Once a surrealist, always a surrealist.
What is shocking here is not Lacan, it’s his postmodern audience. Every field has its lunatics, but in no other part of academia are they numbered among the most revered.
Lucan had learned many new mathematical buzzwords by 1977—irrational and imaginary numbers, compact sets, open covers and so on. Unfortunately, he could not distinguish irrational from imaginary and had little, if any, idea what any of it meant. Yet he was able to conclude:
Thus, the erectile organ comes to symbolize the place of jouissance [enjoyment] … that is why it is equivalent to the square root of minus one [an imaginary number].”
But of course! Is such brilliance the reason Butler, in her book, Gender Troubles, makes heavy use of Lacan and his “jouissance,” referring to him nearly a hundred times? Butler also relies heavily on Irigaray, she of the fluid mechanics and sex organs, and of course on Foucault as well.
The Ultimate Con Game
There have been many strong attacks on the postmodernists, but for 50 years they have continued to mutate and reproduce at an ever-increasing rate. They employ an array of clever defensive and offensive tactics. Foucault said Derrida employed a “terrorism of obscurantism: He writes so obscurely you can’t tell what he’s saying. [Then he says,] ‘You didn’t understand me; you’re an idiot.’”
But I think there’s a more powerful force at work—affinity fraud. This is usually financial, for example, Bernie Madoff targeting fellow Jewish clients. But Nobel economist Paul Krugman has extended the concept of affinity fraud to politics and defines it as:
People are most easily conned when they’re getting their disinformation from someone who seems to be part of their tribe, one way or another.
Postmodernists claim to be radical progressives, and I’m sure most really believe they are. So Democrats, quite naturally, see them as part of the greater Democratic tribe. And they do share many views with us. They hate Trump. They want greater equality. They think “the system” is oppressive.
They’re not after our money. They just want us to trust them and become loyal members of their cult.
Because Democrats (myself included) tend to be open, trusting, big-tent sorts of folk, it’s pretty easy for those we see as similar, even superficially, to suck us in. But taking a closer look shows postmodernist politics may be less progressive than classic conservative politics. Classic conservatism at least shares our belief in the Enlightenment—truth, reason, science, and democracy. And all that is non-negotiable.
The postmodernists reject progressive accomplishments as delusions and claim the Enlightenment has been a failure and only made things worse.
Conclusion
Postmodernists do not belong to the Democratic tribe, although they share certain similarities in appearance. Their ancestry is a mix of Marxism, neo-Marxism, Nietzsche’s elitism, Heidegger’s fascism, and deconstructionist chicanery. Their rejection of truth makes them accidental allies of Trump. They do, however, have good intentions and would be worth winning back to the progressive cause. But don’t hold your breath.
The affinity fraud they are committing has conned more good Democrats than any other political hijacking in our party’s history. The only antidote is to open our eyes, think for ourselves and be brave enough to say what we see. That is not an easy task in the face of the postmodern outrage culture.
Ripped Apart
