Postmodern wokism destroys the foundations
Provoking confusion and division among the people, to the benefit of a few
My last commentary was the third in a series of reflections on Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind; it addressed Bloom’s reflections on race and the university. It included the following:
In the three decades since Professor Bloom departed from this life, black activists have resorted to postmodern constructions, involving deliberate manipulations of empirical evidence and deliberate anti-empirical constructions of history, in order to preserve policies of preferential treatment for blacks, which are primarily of benefit to the black middle class, in a context shaped by increased middle class insecurity in the nation as a whole. The notions of “systemic racism” and “white privilege,” as well as the idea that the nation was established in 1619, are examples of postmodern constructions, integral to an ideology that defends the particular interests of the black middle class, without regard for the needs and interests of other social sectors of the nation, including the black lower class.
In today’s commentary, I elaborate on this point, beginning with discussion of the two epistemological paradigms that have provided the foundation for human thought throughout human history.
Traditional and modern epistemological paradigms
By epistemological paradigm, I mean a worldview with respect to how human beings attain knowledge. In traditional civilizations and cultures, prior to being overwhelmed and distorted by the Western European world conquest of 1492 to 1914, there were a variety of epistemological paradigms, rooted in religious and cultural traditions.
The premodern religions survive today, adapting themselves to modern conditions. The percentages of each religion in the world population today are as follows: Christianity, 31% of the world population; Islam, 25%; unaffiliated (irreligious and atheists), 16%; Hinduism, 15%; Buddhism, 7%; folk religions, 6%; and others, 1%. These religions (excepting unaffiliated) possess a spiritual epistemology, at least implicitly, which attributes a role to a divinity or divinities in the formation of human understanding.
Of the traditional religious epistemologies, Christianity and Islam have the most relevance to the current dynamics of the world, for three reasons. First, their higher percentage of the world population. Secondly, there higher level of organization. And thirdly, their belief in one God who created the human being and who acts in human history and in human affairs.
Christianity and Islam believe that God has revealed to humanity the basic principles that ought to guide human conduct and the personal virtues that human beings ought to seek to develop. They also believe that God has endowed human beings with a natural capacity for reasoning, and God has commanded human beings to use their capacity for reasoning to develop greater knowledge, beyond the principles that have been revealed. The divine revelations are not inconsistent with what humans learn through scientific and philosophical investigation, insofar as there are not human errors in interpreting the divine revelations or in scientific and philosophical investigation.
Therefore, in the Christian and Islamic epistemological worldview, divine revelation is the foundation of human understanding, and it is the basis for the construction of human societies. In the social teachings of the Catholic Church in the last 100 years, and in the formulations of Shiite Islamic theologians, there is emphasis on the divine expectation for humans to construct societies characterized by social justice, especially justice for the poor. However, for this expectation to be realized with perfection, it must be freely chosen by human beings. God does not intervene to correct human sins; the rectification must come from humanity itself.
A different epistemological approach is taken by the modern epistemological paradigm, which is rooted in the Enlightenment, which responded to the errors and sins of European Christianity. The Enlightenment stressed that human beings arrive to understanding through the use of their capacity for reasoning. Empirical investigation, free inquiry with respect to empirical questions and philosophical investigation, and the free exchange of findings and ideas were understood as the foundation of the gradual accumulation of knowledge. Whereas traditional epistemologies viewed stable societies and growing economies as established on a foundation of divine revelation, the Enlightenment envisioned stable and prosperous societies as constructed on a foundation of empirical observation and free inquiry.
The Enlightenment was the philosophical basis for the bourgeois revolutions, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and modern representative democracies. In addition, Enlightenment principles were the foundation for various critical currents of thought and political action. Marxism stressed the role of the conflict of interests between classes in human history since the agricultural revolution, and it projected that the emerging contradiction between the working and capitalist classes in Western societies would give rise to the triumph of the working class and the establishment of a socialist society oriented to transition to a communist classless society. Feminism stressed the importance of patriarchy in human history, and it advocated for a society free of patriarchal assumptions and characterized by gender equality. Western environmentalism stressed the damage being done to nature by human production, and it advocated the development of ecologically sustainable forms of production. In the colonized regions of the Third World, anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism emerged to advocate for an alternative international order based on respect for the sovereignty of nations and cooperation and mutually beneficial trade among nations. All these critical currents of thought were rooted in the principles of the Enlightenment. They were advocating what they understood to be universally applicable truths based on empirical observation and human reasoning. They all believed not only that there was a difference between true and false and between right and wrong; they also believed that this difference was demonstrable through human reasoning and the comprehensive presentation of evidence.
At the same time, imperialism emerged as an Enlightenment heresy. The major Western powers persistently pursued imperialist policies, which are designed to ensure control of the natural resources of the world as well as control of the economic policies of formally independent governments. Imperialism is based in deception, in that it pretends to embrace Enlightenment principles, but in fact it is compelled by its political decision to protect only its interests, and therefore it must violate in practice the principle of the sovereignty of nations as well as the principles of empirical evidence and reasoning. But because its intention is to deceive, it does not openly declare its denial of Enlightenment principles. It constructs anti-empirical narratives of particular nations in order to justify—using Enlightenment principles—its imperialist interventions in the world. And it suppresses and/or discredits all efforts to critique such false narratives through the presentation of previously overlooked or disregarded empirical evidence. Imperialism proclaims adherence to Enlightenment principles, and thus it pertains to the Enlightenment. But inasmuch as it ignores in practice the principles that it proclaims, imperialism can be regarded as an Enlightenment heresy.
Imperialism is a powerful force in human affairs. It has been consistently promoted for more than 100 years by the most powerful governments and corporations in the world. Imperialist thinking is more influential in the Western world today than all the various genuine currents of Enlightenment thought combined. Imperialism is an enormously destructive force, because it drives the implementation of policies that serve only the interests of the most powerful in a small number of nations, precisely when technological developments and ecological issues make necessary a united, intelligent, and moral response to common human challenges. And because its nefarious consequences increasingly push the nations and peoples that are the victims of imperialism to resistance, thereby generating increasingly intense worldwide conflict.
Indeed, the growing strength of anti-imperialist resistance is a central dynamic in world affairs today, although poorly understood by the journalists and educators of the West, whose understanding is limited by the imperialist deception. The anti-imperialist resistance of the Third World is rooted in the Bandung conference of 1955 and its growth and development is seen in: the establishment of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1961; the establishment of G-77 in 1964; the adoption by the UN General Assembly of the declaration for a New International Economic Order in 1974, reaffirmed at the Sixth Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in Havana in 1979; the retaking of the classic anti-imperialist principles of the Non-Aligned Movement at its Fourteenth Summit in Havana in 2006, reversing the highjacking of the Movement by accommodationist politicians led by the Asian tigers; the emergence of a new political reality in Latin America, including a process of regional anti-imperialist union and integration, culminating in the establishment of CELAC in 2010; the formation of BRICS in the period 2006-2011; and the expansion of BRICS to eleven nations in 2023. This anti-imperialist dynamic, a logical response to neocolonialism and imperialism, has been unreported or superficially reported and misunderstood in the Western media, although the recent expansion of BRICS is provoking some commentary that something significant is occurring.
Enter postmodernism
The economy of the United States has fallen in productive and commercial capacity, relative to world production as a whole and relative to emerging economies, particularly China. The decline is a consequence of the policies of the U.S. corporate elite and political establishment, which have been designed to maximize corporate short-term profits rather than the economic and social wellbeing of the nation in the long term. Key moments in these interested and anti-national policies include: the turn to neoliberal economic policies, deciding against policies that would enhance the economic productivity of the nation; the turn to imperialist wars of aggression in the Middle East, deepening the overdependence of the economy on arms industries; and the turn to unconventional wars beginning in 2014, placing the USA in a position of conflict with key nations and with the peoples of the world and further stimulating the interest of the nations of the Third World toward the further construction of an alternative to the Western-centered neocolonial world-system.
The relative decline of the U.S. economy and the fall of the U.S. political-economic system into decadence provided opportunity for the U.S. Left to expand its influence among the people of the United States on the basis of a program of cooperation with the anti-imperialist movements of the world, building upon the vitality of the black power and student anti-war movements of the period 1965 to 1972, both of which had central anti-imperialist ideological dimensions. There were various factors that prevented the U.S. Left from seizing this opportunity. First, black power and black nationalist organizations were repressed by the local, state, and federal governments. Secondly, the student anti-war movement was incapable of sustaining itself as a long-term social movement, due to its political immaturity. And thirdly, leftist academics were incapable of connecting to and lending maturity and permanence to the anti-war movement, inasmuch as they were unable to overcome the obstacles presented by the academic norms of value freedom and by the fragmentation of the social sciences and the humanities.
In the context of the decline of the U.S. economy and the ideological stagnation of the Left, there occurred the spread and proliferation of postmodern epistemological assumptions. Whereas traditional epistemology believes that important truths are divinely revealed, and the Enlightenment in its various versions assumes that truth is discovered through empirical observation; the postmodern paradigm, in contrast, proclaims that truth is neither revealed nor discovered but constructed. In the words of Abigail Favale, postmodernism is “a worldview that sees reality in terms of narratives that are created by human beings, rather than an order of objective truths that can be discovered by human beings.”
The postmodern belief in the construction of truth is liberating for the individual, because it frees you to construct any convenient or useful truth claim, freed from the duty of comprehensive examination of all relevant empirical evidence that is brought to consciousness. The postmodern individual is free to construct a truth in accordance with preferences or interests. Indeed, he or she is free to deliberately and consciously construct a version of the truth for personal or political reasons or economic motives, unconstrained by rules of evidence and reasoning. It is of course a personal freedom that is noxious for society, because it undermines the possibility of arriving to consensus on the basis of dialogue concerning differing truth claims that are based in empirical evidence and reasoning.
In The Genesis of Gender,1 published in 2022, Abigail Favale maintains that postmodern epistemological assumptions entered the USA via academic feminism, influenced by the existentialist feminism of Simone de Beauvoir and especially the postmodern scholarship of Judith Butler, who arrived to her postmodern beliefs through the French postmodernist Michel Foucault. Favale writes that Butler’s “primary goal as a theorist is to dismantle the normalization of heterosexual relationships—the tendency to see the male and female sexual relationship as normal and natural.” Favale maintains that, for Butler, “the idea that humankind is split into two sexes that are biologically complementary is a social fiction,” a social fiction that is not a matter of fact but is a creation that is enforced by the institutions of power.
The view that social fictions are constructed as a mechanism of elite power has led to the emergence, Favale maintains, of “a postmodern political praxis, in which language is intentionally manipulated” in an effort to create a new institutionalized reality. An example of the postmodern manipulation of language is its claim that nearly 2% of infants are intersex, that is, not unambiguously male or female. The maneuver involves including in the intersex category infants with conditions that could lead to problems in fertility, thus elevating the percentage of “intersex” infants at birth from 0.018% (2 of 10,000 births) to nearly 2%.
Beginning more or less a decade ago, there has emerged a postmodern ideology in defense of the interests of the black middle class. It is an ideology characterized by a free construction in accordance with interests and preferences, unconstrained by limits imposed by empirical reality and rules of empirical observation.
For example, the concept of “systemic racism” has been formulated without attention to the different realities before and after the civil rights reforms of the period 1954 to 1965. These reforms were carried out with the significant participation of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches; and they were undertaken with the intention of bringing national racial norms in line with the new norms of the neocolonial world-system. With awareness of this process of fundamental historical social change, it would be reasonable to expect the possibility of a decline in white racism following 1965.
However, this reasonable and basic distinction in time periods is ignored by the formulators of the concept of systemic racism; they select examples of white racism without attention to historical time frame. Even worse, the great majority of their examples of racism are taken from the pre-1965 period, yet they are offered as evidence of systemic racism continuing in the later period. In addition, examples of racism taken from the post-1965 period are presented without analysis of the extent to which such actions are indications of a general pattern. At the same time, correlations between race and certain social indicators are presented, without exploring possible explanations of the correlation other than white racism.
Another recent concept is “white privilege,” which is presented without a clear definition of what it is supposed to mean in the post-1965 era. “White privilege” was certainly a component of the pre-1965 reality, but since then, various national and global dynamics have undermined the socioeconomic conditions of whites. The imposition by the world power elites of neoliberal policies have increased insecurity for the middle, working, and lower classes, regardless of race and ethnicity. Meanwhile, privileges associated with race have been in decline. Thus, the concept of white privilege is inconsistent with the emerging empirical reality. It also is a concept that is not politically intelligent, inasmuch as the political emphasis ought to be on the unity of all sectors of the people.
The claim that the nation was established in 1619 is another example of a postmodern construction. Noting that 1619 is the year that the first African slaves arrived in the English colonies of North America, this claim ignores the limited role of slavery in the economies of eleven of the thirteen colonies prior to 1800. Nor is there any attempt to explain the function in the national and world economy of the expanding slavery of the U.S. South during the period 1800 to 1860, which as we all know led to the intensification of the conflict between the North and the South and culminated in the abolition of slavery, although not the abolition of forced labor in the form of black and white sharecropping and tenant farming. Nor is there any attempt to understand slavery in the context of other systems of forced labor in the nation and the world from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries.
“Systemic racism” and “white privilege” cannot be reasonably defended as descriptive of the post-1965 reality in the United States. Nor can the notion that the nation was established in 1619 be defended with historical evidence. These are not constructions from the data in a process seeking truth; they are constructions that ignore data in order to promote the ideological agenda of the black middle class as it seeks to preserve structures of preferential treatment established in the 1960s, but which could possibly lose political support in the context of new economic and ideological conditions that have been evolving since 1980.
The postmodern black middle-class ideology has been supported and disseminated by the corporate elite. Postmodernism is in the interests of the elite, because it takes from the people the power of the objective meaning of words, sending the people into a pit of conflicting subjectivities, and thus rendering them powerless to defend themselves. It creates confusion and division in the nation, in a historic moment of crisis for the nation and the world, in which the power elite is demonstrating its decadence, and in which the unified political intelligence of the people is a necessity.
The response of soft white male sociologists
A more reasonable approach to the challenge posed by the discovery of the social construction of knowledge was formulated by Alvin Gouldner in 1970, prior to the postmodern ideological invasion. In The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, a book that was widely read by leftist sociologists of the era, Goulder critiqued the concept of value freedom, which at the time was a widely held epistemological concept among sociologists. Gouldner maintained that hidden background assumptions, often rooted in culture, generally influence sociological analyses. Background assumptions, he maintained, shape what we select from the empirical data, such that sociological analyses are subjectively constructed from empirical data.2
Gouldner’s purpose was to call upon social scientists to seek to develop consciousness of their hidden assumptions. Gouldner summoned scholars to personal authenticity, which includes: (1) self-reflection seeking awareness of one’s value premises and assumptions; (2) commitment to explicitly stated moral principles; and (3) commitment to truth as the highest goal.3
Gouldner’s approach of “personal authenticity” took institutional form in the Association for Humanist Sociology, which developed a norm that papers and presentations begin with a “reflexive statement” that sought to identify value premises and assumptions, and that sought to make clear the personal foundation of the scholarship. The Association was small in numbers, and it consisted overwhelmingly of young, white, male sociologists. Rejected by the mainstream, dismissed by black scholars, and ignored by feminists, we described ourselves as an association of “soft white males.”
At that time, I believed that Gouldner’s approach of “personal authenticity” was not sufficient to overcome the subjectivist implications of the influence of culturally bounded assumptions on social scientific and philosophical analyses. And therefore, “personal authenticity” was not sufficient to prevent the nefarious consequences that would result from resolving questions of truth through the application of power. I therefore undertook a study of the cognitional theory of Bernard Lonergan at Fordham University, under the tutelage of sociology professor Joseph P. Fitzpatrick and philosophy professor Gerald McCool. I arrived to the method of cross-horizon encounter as the key to discovering background assumptions, because when you listen seriously to what people of other cultural horizons understand and believe, further relevant questions emerge in your consciousness, the investigation of which—if you are committed to discovering truth as the highest goal—leads you to the awareness of assumptions previously assumed without consciousness.
In pursuing personal development through the method of cross-horizon encounter, I have learned, among other things, that the people’s revolutions of the Third World today have arrived to consensus in understanding with respects to the historical processes of colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism; and with respect to the common moral principles that ought to guide humanity. The governments and peoples of the world have reiterated these consensual understandings of the fundamental facts of modern human history and fundamental moral principles in repeated declarations in international forums, beginning more than seven decades ago. So here we confront a surprising fact that is not initially seen when one first becomes aware of the social context of knowledge, namely, in spite of cultural and ideological differences among the peoples of the world, they have attained a consensual understanding of the true and the right through a sustained process that I have named “cross-horizon encounter” and they call a “dialogue of civilizations.”
In contrast to personal authenticity and a dialogue of civilizations, postmodernism takes a cynical approach to the epistemological problem posed by the restriction placed on understanding by cultural horizons. It maintains that, inasmuch as hidden assumptions unavoidably influence understanding, we are free to construct any understanding we want, in accordance with our subjective thoughts and preferences. We are freed from the obligation to construct on the basis of empirical evidence.
But it is a noxious freedom, for it condemns us to ignorance and to a constant war among the different preferences, with none of the preferences able to demonstrate its greater validity on the basis of some agreed upon standard or test. In a postmodern world, we can express our preferences and desires to our heart’s content; but we are condemned to live in a world of division, confusion, and ignorance, with an incapacity to resolve any problem.
Where do we go from here?
It is one thing to recognize that your understanding begins with culturally and socially grounded assumptions, concerning which you are not aware; and to dedicate yourself to continuous and sustained dialogue and personal encounter with persons from other cultures who also are seeking to understand, with the intention of bringing background assumptions to consciousness. It is quite another thing to celebrate your subjective perception at the beginning of the process of understanding; and to declare your right to subjective expression, without regard for empirical reality, in defense of particular interests.
The current historic moment needs historical, social scientific, and philosophical analyses rooted in an empirical investigation that seeks to understand the true and the right, an analysis that by virtue of its insight is capable of unifying the people to confront the irresponsible conduct of the elite. The nation today needs an alliance of the believers in the traditional epistemologies and the mainstream and critical variants of the Enlightenment epistemologies, formulating a consensus based on continuous dialogue, a consensus that confirms fundamental moral principles that ought to guide the nation and the basic historic facts that explain what the nation was, is, and can become.
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Favale, Abigail. 2022. The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory. San Francisco: Ignatius Press.
Gouldner, Alvin. 1970. The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. New York: Avon Book.
Charles McKelvey, Beyond Ethnocentrism: A Reconstruction of Marx’s Concept of Science (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), Pp. 15-20.