Postmodernism made it respectable to be cynical about truth and facts and helped create an environment in which there is less pushback against populist ideas – like a body with a depressed immune system. The obsession of the libertarian with individual liberty crowds out the value of truth. In the end, their thinking becomes deliberate and contrarian for the sake of it. They end up believing what they want to believe – they don’t want to accept the truths of ecology, of climate science, etc. so they deny them – since the truth is an imposition on the individual and puts him at odds with willingness to accept other truths. Once the intellectual mainstream thoroughly accepted there are many accepted valid truths and realities; once the idea of gates and gatekeepers was discredited, not just on campuses, but throughout culture, the American right could have their claims taken seriously. Postmodern intellectuals turned out be ‘useful idiots’ for the economic elite.
“Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all”, claims Adam Smith. In this Smith is stressing that the main task of government was the defense of the rich against the poor. However, democracy ceased to be the exercise of political power and was identified instead with the resignation from it and the associated transfer of this power, through the elections, to a political elite, even for the Founding Fathers. They not only saw representation as a means of distancing the people from politics but proposed it because it favored the economically powerful. For the Founding Fathers like Hamilton not only was there no incompatibility between democracy and the domination of the economically powerful but, in fact, this was considered to be the rule.1
The more or less simultaneous institutionalization of the system of the market economy and representative ‘democracy’, during the Industrial Revolution in the West, introduced the fundamental element of modernity: the formal separation of society from the economy and the state which has been ever since the basis of modernity. Not only direct producers were not able anymore to control the product of their work but, also, citizens were offered a new form of political organization called ‘democracy’, where political power is exercised indirectly through elected representatives. In other words, the market economy and representative democracy had in fact institutionalized the unequal distribution of political and economic power among citizens. Furthermore, it could be shown that the gradual extension of the right to citizenship to the vast majority of the population – a process that was completed only in the 20th century – did not offset the effective loss of the meaning of citizenship, in terms of the exercise of power.
The neoliberal version of libertarian policies was based on the belief of economic ‘democracy’ through the market and individualism, in the sense of the citizen’s liberation from `dependence’ on the welfare state. Ironically, the main demand of the New Left for self-determination and autonomy was embraced by the neoliberals and was reformulated by them in a distorted form as a demand for self-determination through the market! In this manner postmodernity contributes to the neoliberal ideas that seek to eradicate the discussion of power asymmetries. Embracing postmodernism, much like embracing neoliberal ideology, depends heavily on the group to do your thinking for you. By happenchance, there occurred a coalition between neoliberalism, an economic policy that serves the interest of a tiny minority, and an ideology – postmodernism – that appears to include everybody. Louis Althusser has remarked, ideology consists of trading in your real problems for the imaginary problems you would prefer to have.
One of Jean Francois Lyotard’s primary concerns was how metanarratives are often used toward “the goal of legitimizing social and political institutions and practices, laws, ethics, ways of thinking.” What are metanarratives? They are the types of grand stories that purport to tell us How Things Are. Marxism is a meta-narrative. Christianity is a meta-narrative. Libertarian neoliberalism is a meta-narrative. The rise of neoliberalism during the late 1970s in the West, however, fundamentally questioned the role of higher education institutions in the process of public good formation. Roughly at the same time that neoliberalism began to question the purposes of higher education institutions, theories which became labeled postmodern also emerged and challenged the notion that knowledge produced by higher education was liberating. The flattening of expertise and authority, the attack on professionalism and the rise of the cult of the amateur that these changes herald are also consistent with postmodernity.
Postmodern arguments also interpret the gross disparity of wealth and the abundance of famine and suffering in the world as the fault of modern thought, posing the question thusly: if modern thought and science indeed solves these problems, then why do they still exist? Postmodernists believe the relationship between language and reality is unreliable because language is a subjectively constructed phenomenon that does not transcend time; a person can communicate utterances that are only true within the context in which they are spoken. Counterintuitively, in a postmodern context, words are never intended to be literal. Language and rhetoric are used elliptically, metaphorically and deliberately falsely, textured with layers of circumstantial meaning, designed to help the speaker evade answering a question or taking a permanent position. The theory of victory for a postmodernist is to either change the nature of the established power structure altogether, or to increase and maintain discord.2
Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) asked: why did the revolution succeed in Russia, and not in Italy or anywhere else in Western Europe, where classical Marxism had predicted it would be more likely to occur due to the more advanced development of capitalism? He argued that the reason for this failure was an incorrect understanding of the workings of power in modern capitalism: while Marxist revolutionary practice had assumed that political power was concentrated in the state apparatus, Gramsci suggested that power also rested in the institutions of ‘civil society’ or the structures and organization of everyday life. The revolution would therefore have to aim not only at conquering state power, but much more importantly, to create an alternative civil society, which would have to be able to attract the majority of people by convincing them of the validity of the project, which was in turn premised on its ability to perform.
By 2020 many thinkers agree that prevailing neoliberal policy framework has failed society, resulting in monumental and growing income gap. The discipline’s focus on markets and incentives, methodological individualism, and mathematical formulism all seem to stand in the way of meaningful, larger-scale economic and social reform. In short, neoliberalism appears to be just another name for economics controlled by an existing economic elite. It appears that many of the dominant policy ideas of the last few decades are supported neither by sound economics nor by good evidence. This leads one to conclude that it is necessary to spend more time on the analysis of market failure and how to fix them rather than defer to the magic of competitive markets. The answer must address the growing concentration of wealth, the costs of climate change, the concentration of important markets, the stagnation of income for the working class, and the changing patterns in social mobility.
Foucault concentrates more on the ethic of truth as an individual position, while Gramsci is more concerned with the problem of a politics of truth, of the struggle for the means of knowledge and the ability to impose a certain “objective reality” within a hegemonic struggle. Cultural hegemony locks up a society even more tightly because of the way ideas are transmitted by language. The words we use to speak and write have been constructed by social interactions through history and shaped by the dominant ideology of the times. Thus, they are loaded with cultural meanings that condition us to think in particular ways, and to not be able to think very well in other ways. For Foucault, to challenge power is not a matter of seeking some absolute truth, but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present time.
Since, postmodernists are relentlessly constructing and reconstructing their identities and realities, the postmodern self remains an unfinished project, with identity becoming a role and a performance in the making, temporarily selecting the one which becomes best for public consumption and recognition. What is our way forward? When faced with lies posing as truths, we should just call them what they are, rather than claiming there is no such thing as objective truth. All we can be certain of, is that insisting there is no truth; that claims of objectivity are always driven by interests of power, and that science is more objective than Scientology is simply not going to be. We need to get the gatekeepers back at the gates. If the media professionals restore public trust, they can still play the role of mirror for society, shedding light where there is darkness, pursuing vital stories that those in power try to hide from the public.
1 Takis Fotopoulos. The Myth of Postmodernity https://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/dn/vol7/takis_postmodernism.htm
2 Larry Kay. “A New Postmodern Condition”: Why Disinformation Has Become So Effective https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/new-postmodern-condition-why-disinformation-has-become-so-effective