If you're reading this, you've made it to the end of a very long piece. Thanks for taking the time! I hope it gave you something to think about. And thanks, as always, to the Gadfly's supporters who make this possible.
If you've stumbled upon this piece and found it useful, do subscribe and click the like button. It helps others find it.
P.S., I usually post essays on Sundays. However, since the schedule is a social construct, I'm posting this one today. Enjoy your weekend and Happy Easter.
Superb piece! Thank you for doing all the work that was necessary to create it.
One aspect of the woke movement that I find interesting is that they took the airy, ultra-abstract ideas of the postmodernist philosophers and converted them into chunks of concrete. Their movement has been described by critics as "social justice fundamentalism" in part because of that characteristic.
I infer that a specifically fundamentalist type of belief system is what many people in the West are seeking. They want to hear that there are certainties backed up by the authority of gods. Skeptics with open, inquiring minds might always be the truly "marginal" people in a society, but in times of grave, systemic uncertainty in a culture, we become both more rare and more vocal.
Thanks, Sandra. The "chunks of concrete" made me think of Carl Andre's Equivalent VIII (the bricks laid out on the floor). Yes, I think you're right. It looks a lot like a religion or at least has family resemblances.
Thia was wonderful. Wish I still had some intellectual friends I could share it with. In a nutshell it seems to me that once we go from a subsistence society we need something else to dwell upon which usually leads to emotional self involvement and then strange politics. Thank you for giving me a lot to chew on this holiday.
For years I've been claiming to artist friends (I'm a painter) that Duchamp's early Dada piece at once make a statement and bring it to its logical conclusion, and to which a lot of later creations by others are mere footnotes.
The fact that he was the first, on its own, makes him something of a genius. I think it is telling and significant that many of his later pieces are much more traditional artistic expressions.
Masterful essay, thank you. Happy Easter to you too. The Gadfly and Danny Burmawi's substack are my best discoveries so far this year. Funniest: "the Guardian = a Foucault newsletter with a sports section". Scruton's "Frauds, Fools and Firebrands" is one of my favourite books too.
Thanks, Isabella – glad you enjoyed it. You're the only person I know who's read FFF (it's brilliant), so your kind words really mean something. I almost cut that joke, by the way.
FFF is a classic. I read it as postgrad Eng Lit student, and having bought into postmodern philosophy/critical theory wholesale, reading Scruton's careful demolition of European leftist intellectuals came in the nick of time.
I felt like I'd been rescued from a cult. And like being deprogrammed, there was a huge amount of shame at my lofty posturing while believing such nonsense, which connects to Scruton's conclusion, now commonplace, that leftist intellectuals are essentially religious.
Glad there are three of us now (readers of FFF). You describe a fascinating and fairly common trajectory. Scruton will quickly disabuse most people who can still open their minds an inch because the logic is so sound, the writing so elegant (in contrast to the stuff he's commenting on). I must admit, I was taken in by Derrida and others a little at university. It's beguiling, hypnotic stuff. Scruton breaks the spell, although almost nobody read him because he was (and remains) unfashionable.
Indeed. I found Lyotard's reasoning, as a descriptive commentary, straightforward and convincing as a diagnostic, and had it stopped there it would've been fine. I also find Baudrilliard (and in similar vein, Marcuse) to be significant thinkers in terms of comprehending the deadening effect of technology and the loss of the 'real'.
I agree with your conclusion that it's Foucault with his fictional histories, and the godawful Butler who are the main culprits of the current malaise. I'd probably throw in Deleuze & Guattari as hugely influential in the art & design space in particular. Not that anyone in those spaces has read their convoluted prolix, but it's common to see art students sloganeering about 'rhizomes' (and hoping no-one asks what they mean).
Can I second every word of your comment including the discovery of this substack and Danny Burmawi. I haven’t read the Scruton book so that’s something I must do.
Thanks for another wonderful piece Frederick. Having lived through the gender ideology years and researching its origins, I’m of the opinion that post modernism should be dissected and ridiculed at every opportunity.
Thanks! I have struggled with gender ideology myself for many years. I gave a paper at an international conference in Leiden in 2023 which has since then clearly divided the academic community for me into two camps, one of which no longer even greeted me the next day, i.e. the "be kind" community. Fortunately, there was the other camp as well. Section 4 onwards is about sex realism vs sex denialism. An alleged "deep disagreement" that is in fact not irresolvable nor deep at all. https://ilias-argumentation.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/ISSA23_Proceedings_Ilias_Arg.pdf (It's the first paper in the open-access volume, easy to locate.)
Many thanks, will enjoy later. At a glance I can see lots of familiar names. And well done for speaking out. The breaking of the ‘no debate’ strategy has been crucial in fighting this ludicrous ideology.
"Postmodernism for Dummies" -- thanks for this explainer! Too many people, even among academics, are unaware of the philosophical roots of the nonsense that is now permeating our lives. Studies departments, speech codes, DEI policies, rooting for Hamas and Iranian clerics, progressive justice -- all of it come from the same bible. Understanding this is a step towards immunizing yourself against this deadly decease.
I loved this Frederick. As a philosophy grad student in the 70’s I wrote my Master’s thesis on GE Moore’s Defense of Common Sense (in response to radical skepticism). Wittgenstein, who saw everything as a linguistic problem, was I believe aligned with Postmodernist thought? I really like the way you showed that this fun, amusing philosophical speculations have had real world highly destructive consequences. Great job! And happy passover too.
Thanks, Kim. Yes, Derrida and others can be fun in a way. I found them rather entrancing when I really got into the ideas. But it takes someone like Scruton to break the spell; hard reality doesn't do the job by itself, unfortunately. I didn't get round to GE Moore, but I'm sure the effect is similar. As for Wittgenstein, there's some crossover with Derrida on language, but Wittgenstein was after clarity, not relativism – which (I think) is why the postmodernists tend to ignore him.
I always read that quote by Butler and imagine how I would tell any student of mine just how bad it is, starting at "It's at least three sentences welded badly together", before moving on to the errors of content.
I, along with many other people, consider progressivism to be a cult.
We often marvel at the absurdities that cultists, any cultists, believe. It turns out that there is a reason for that. I forget who said it (maybe Joost Meerloo), but it's been pointed out that you can't express your undying loyalty to a cause by expressing common sense that everyone else also accepts. Cultists express their loyalty to the cause by accepting and promoting absurd beliefs, the more absurd the better.
Gosh this was a time travel article. I was studying history at Warwick in the early nineties. The various bits of courses were all fairly standard for two years (early modern, medieval, and an interesting digression into witchcraft in the second year).
And then the 3rd year hit with the ‘philosophy of history’. Having read EH Carr’s and Collingwood’s texts from the 60s I felt equipped.
And then the lectures hit like a wall. One individual not touched on in your article in enough detail was Claude Levi Strauss and the essays on relativism.
But combined with Foucault and Derrida (and the rest) it utterly annihilated my interest in the space of 10 weeks in anything I had studied over the last 2.5 years. It was clearly rendered, as far as the ‘cool’ directions of history at the time, irrelevant and its implications for culture and wider society I could see coming a mile off.
I sat down for my finals, and partly because there was a click bait question about postmodernism and relativism, basically threw up my arms and launched into a 1000 word rant about how the entire thing was a fraud. It was infuriating watching a discipline effectively render itself superfluous. Samuel Johnson and the stone sprang to mind.
Somehow I got a 2:2 despite that incoherent rant but fell out of love with history for many years until I read scruton.
A more perniscious intellectual platform I haven’t seen and that included the bearded Marxist Lecturers at the time wittering on about the Soviet Union at precisely the same time as their world view collapsed around them (one of the joys of studying on the early 90s).
But postmodernism is the real poison that still drip feeds through our society.
This did not come from nowhere: it grew out of the frustrations of European leftists at the collapse of Stalinism (or rather, the popular unmasking of Stalinism) and the collapse of logical positivism within Western Philosophy. I wrote about these connections to Postmodernism https://theliminallens.substack.com/p/the-perilous-dance-of-philosophy?r=dvftt
And was vastly more brilliant not to mention a much greater writer and literary artist. All his epigones stole the spicy poses and transgressive trappings, but left out the skill and craft of writing. I guess the former is much easier than the latter.
Yes, and as CP says, of a totally different order – a literary genius and intelligible to any intelligent reader, as opposed to many of those who cite him as an influence.
Just when I think it’s not possible for you to top your previous piece, you prove me wrong… Excellent piece and so perfectly on target…
Although not exclusive to the Left, the entire postmodern “thinking” if you can possibly call it thinking, in my experience has been exclusively Leftists who are frustrated that what they desperately want to be “true” refuses to be, no matter how loud they scream.
Your observation about guilt, boredom and the empty church are validation of my own perceptions as well…
People may become cynical about God and religion but that DOES NOT change the fact that we humans NEED a purpose, something to believe in and the fact that environmentalists are as ZEALOUS as they are simply illustrates that these same people would’ve been part of the Spanish Inquisition 500 years ago…
It was documented that during the 1964 Alaska earthquake which lasted FIVE minutes, that many people, after the first few minutes, got BORED and wondered when it would stop… Boredom is one of the few states of human nature that are more dangerous than many of the Seven Deadly Sins COMBINED…
Thanks, Steve. The earthquake anecdote is brilliant – bored during an earthquake. That might be the most concise illustration of the problem I've seen. Appreciate the kind words and the re-read.
Thank you, absolutely brilliant. We all know something's not quite right. We see the streets filled with anything from marching theocracy apologists to hammer and sickle banners flying above the useful idiots. The more sinister side is evident as antifa shows it's face behind mask. It kind of looks like the mess on the streets of Germany post WW1 (Okay, that's an exaggeration) but who knows what Ubermensch may rise from the ashes of uncertainty.
The essay drew a clear, straight line from Foucault to today's over active immune system. Excellent.
“Postmodernism simply turned the body’s defences against itself. The capacity for self-criticism – essential for progress and error correction in a free and open society – became the disease, attacking the host organism rather than identifying and eliminating external pathogens.”
This is a very attractive analogy, but I don’t understand how post-modern critique differs in a qualitative sense from the regular skepticism and criticism necessary, as you said, for the “error correction” of a modern, liberal society.
Is it just the normal error correction taken to absurd extremes or is there something fundamentally different? I can’t seem to understand that point.
Fair question. The difference is that postmodern scepticism is aimed at the very principles that make scepticism possible – reason, objective truth, shared language, etc. Healthy error correction depends on those things remaining intact. Postmodernism makes an enemy of them, which is how you end up with relativism, "my truth" epistemology, and pregnant men.
So, yes, normal error correction taken to absurd extremes – but the qualitative difference is that ordinary scepticism questions specific claims while accepting the framework that makes questioning possible. Postmodernism questions the framework itself.
There's a parallel with Popper's paradox of tolerance. Tolerance is essential to an open society, but a tolerance of intolerance destroys it. Same logic.
The paradox created when they argue against reason and objective truth. If reason is just power domination and objective truth doesn’t exist, their arguments are just as subjective as everyone else’s.
Yes, pretty much. It eats itself in the end, or it should. A lot of it is intellectual masturbation, which can be fun in the seminar room. Less so (for the rest of us) when it enters the institutions.
If you're reading this, you've made it to the end of a very long piece. Thanks for taking the time! I hope it gave you something to think about. And thanks, as always, to the Gadfly's supporters who make this possible.
If you've stumbled upon this piece and found it useful, do subscribe and click the like button. It helps others find it.
P.S., I usually post essays on Sundays. However, since the schedule is a social construct, I'm posting this one today. Enjoy your weekend and Happy Easter.
Superb piece! Thank you for doing all the work that was necessary to create it.
One aspect of the woke movement that I find interesting is that they took the airy, ultra-abstract ideas of the postmodernist philosophers and converted them into chunks of concrete. Their movement has been described by critics as "social justice fundamentalism" in part because of that characteristic.
I infer that a specifically fundamentalist type of belief system is what many people in the West are seeking. They want to hear that there are certainties backed up by the authority of gods. Skeptics with open, inquiring minds might always be the truly "marginal" people in a society, but in times of grave, systemic uncertainty in a culture, we become both more rare and more vocal.
Thanks, Sandra. The "chunks of concrete" made me think of Carl Andre's Equivalent VIII (the bricks laid out on the floor). Yes, I think you're right. It looks a lot like a religion or at least has family resemblances.
Love that metaphor "converted them into chunks of concrete". The intellectual burden translates into any actual physical heaviness.
Thia was wonderful. Wish I still had some intellectual friends I could share it with. In a nutshell it seems to me that once we go from a subsistence society we need something else to dwell upon which usually leads to emotional self involvement and then strange politics. Thank you for giving me a lot to chew on this holiday.
Thanks for reading, Alison – glad you enjoyed it. Have a great weekend.
For years I've been claiming to artist friends (I'm a painter) that Duchamp's early Dada piece at once make a statement and bring it to its logical conclusion, and to which a lot of later creations by others are mere footnotes.
The fact that he was the first, on its own, makes him something of a genius. I think it is telling and significant that many of his later pieces are much more traditional artistic expressions.
Very good piece, thank you.
Masterful essay, thank you. Happy Easter to you too. The Gadfly and Danny Burmawi's substack are my best discoveries so far this year. Funniest: "the Guardian = a Foucault newsletter with a sports section". Scruton's "Frauds, Fools and Firebrands" is one of my favourite books too.
Thanks, Isabella – glad you enjoyed it. You're the only person I know who's read FFF (it's brilliant), so your kind words really mean something. I almost cut that joke, by the way.
FFF is a classic. I read it as postgrad Eng Lit student, and having bought into postmodern philosophy/critical theory wholesale, reading Scruton's careful demolition of European leftist intellectuals came in the nick of time.
I felt like I'd been rescued from a cult. And like being deprogrammed, there was a huge amount of shame at my lofty posturing while believing such nonsense, which connects to Scruton's conclusion, now commonplace, that leftist intellectuals are essentially religious.
Glad there are three of us now (readers of FFF). You describe a fascinating and fairly common trajectory. Scruton will quickly disabuse most people who can still open their minds an inch because the logic is so sound, the writing so elegant (in contrast to the stuff he's commenting on). I must admit, I was taken in by Derrida and others a little at university. It's beguiling, hypnotic stuff. Scruton breaks the spell, although almost nobody read him because he was (and remains) unfashionable.
Indeed. I found Lyotard's reasoning, as a descriptive commentary, straightforward and convincing as a diagnostic, and had it stopped there it would've been fine. I also find Baudrilliard (and in similar vein, Marcuse) to be significant thinkers in terms of comprehending the deadening effect of technology and the loss of the 'real'.
I agree with your conclusion that it's Foucault with his fictional histories, and the godawful Butler who are the main culprits of the current malaise. I'd probably throw in Deleuze & Guattari as hugely influential in the art & design space in particular. Not that anyone in those spaces has read their convoluted prolix, but it's common to see art students sloganeering about 'rhizomes' (and hoping no-one asks what they mean).
I am not familiar with Scruton but he sounds like my kind of guy. Thanks for introducing me to his critique of postmodernism.
Here's a great place to start: https://newcriterion.com/article/why-i-became-a-conservative/
Can I second every word of your comment including the discovery of this substack and Danny Burmawi. I haven’t read the Scruton book so that’s something I must do.
Thanks for another wonderful piece Frederick. Having lived through the gender ideology years and researching its origins, I’m of the opinion that post modernism should be dissected and ridiculed at every opportunity.
I'll take a look at Danny Burmawi’s articles today. Thanks, TT.
Thanks! I have struggled with gender ideology myself for many years. I gave a paper at an international conference in Leiden in 2023 which has since then clearly divided the academic community for me into two camps, one of which no longer even greeted me the next day, i.e. the "be kind" community. Fortunately, there was the other camp as well. Section 4 onwards is about sex realism vs sex denialism. An alleged "deep disagreement" that is in fact not irresolvable nor deep at all. https://ilias-argumentation.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/ISSA23_Proceedings_Ilias_Arg.pdf (It's the first paper in the open-access volume, easy to locate.)
Many thanks, will enjoy later. At a glance I can see lots of familiar names. And well done for speaking out. The breaking of the ‘no debate’ strategy has been crucial in fighting this ludicrous ideology.
"Postmodernism for Dummies" -- thanks for this explainer! Too many people, even among academics, are unaware of the philosophical roots of the nonsense that is now permeating our lives. Studies departments, speech codes, DEI policies, rooting for Hamas and Iranian clerics, progressive justice -- all of it come from the same bible. Understanding this is a step towards immunizing yourself against this deadly decease.
I loved this Frederick. As a philosophy grad student in the 70’s I wrote my Master’s thesis on GE Moore’s Defense of Common Sense (in response to radical skepticism). Wittgenstein, who saw everything as a linguistic problem, was I believe aligned with Postmodernist thought? I really like the way you showed that this fun, amusing philosophical speculations have had real world highly destructive consequences. Great job! And happy passover too.
Thanks, Kim. Yes, Derrida and others can be fun in a way. I found them rather entrancing when I really got into the ideas. But it takes someone like Scruton to break the spell; hard reality doesn't do the job by itself, unfortunately. I didn't get round to GE Moore, but I'm sure the effect is similar. As for Wittgenstein, there's some crossover with Derrida on language, but Wittgenstein was after clarity, not relativism – which (I think) is why the postmodernists tend to ignore him.
I always read that quote by Butler and imagine how I would tell any student of mine just how bad it is, starting at "It's at least three sentences welded badly together", before moving on to the errors of content.
Wow that was interesting bit of history you put out there good work
Thanks, Layla – glad you found it interesting.
Welcome I like history and historical events that took place
Just breathtakingly brilliant.
I, along with many other people, consider progressivism to be a cult.
We often marvel at the absurdities that cultists, any cultists, believe. It turns out that there is a reason for that. I forget who said it (maybe Joost Meerloo), but it's been pointed out that you can't express your undying loyalty to a cause by expressing common sense that everyone else also accepts. Cultists express their loyalty to the cause by accepting and promoting absurd beliefs, the more absurd the better.
That explains a lot!
Yes, a loyalty test, exactly. The absurdity is the point.
Gosh this was a time travel article. I was studying history at Warwick in the early nineties. The various bits of courses were all fairly standard for two years (early modern, medieval, and an interesting digression into witchcraft in the second year).
And then the 3rd year hit with the ‘philosophy of history’. Having read EH Carr’s and Collingwood’s texts from the 60s I felt equipped.
And then the lectures hit like a wall. One individual not touched on in your article in enough detail was Claude Levi Strauss and the essays on relativism.
But combined with Foucault and Derrida (and the rest) it utterly annihilated my interest in the space of 10 weeks in anything I had studied over the last 2.5 years. It was clearly rendered, as far as the ‘cool’ directions of history at the time, irrelevant and its implications for culture and wider society I could see coming a mile off.
I sat down for my finals, and partly because there was a click bait question about postmodernism and relativism, basically threw up my arms and launched into a 1000 word rant about how the entire thing was a fraud. It was infuriating watching a discipline effectively render itself superfluous. Samuel Johnson and the stone sprang to mind.
Somehow I got a 2:2 despite that incoherent rant but fell out of love with history for many years until I read scruton.
A more perniscious intellectual platform I haven’t seen and that included the bearded Marxist Lecturers at the time wittering on about the Soviet Union at precisely the same time as their world view collapsed around them (one of the joys of studying on the early 90s).
But postmodernism is the real poison that still drip feeds through our society.
I suspect your "incoherent rant" was a hell of a lot more coherent than the thing it was ranting against. Brilliant comment– thanks, Ridgemont.
This did not come from nowhere: it grew out of the frustrations of European leftists at the collapse of Stalinism (or rather, the popular unmasking of Stalinism) and the collapse of logical positivism within Western Philosophy. I wrote about these connections to Postmodernism https://theliminallens.substack.com/p/the-perilous-dance-of-philosophy?r=dvftt
This gives some very useful background, very comprehensive (lots of links to more reading). Thanks, Simon.
Nietzsche preceded them all by many decades.
And was vastly more brilliant not to mention a much greater writer and literary artist. All his epigones stole the spicy poses and transgressive trappings, but left out the skill and craft of writing. I guess the former is much easier than the latter.
Yes, and as CP says, of a totally different order – a literary genius and intelligible to any intelligent reader, as opposed to many of those who cite him as an influence.
Definitely. Foucault is a fairly easy read though, unlike Butler and especially Derrida.
Just when I think it’s not possible for you to top your previous piece, you prove me wrong… Excellent piece and so perfectly on target…
Although not exclusive to the Left, the entire postmodern “thinking” if you can possibly call it thinking, in my experience has been exclusively Leftists who are frustrated that what they desperately want to be “true” refuses to be, no matter how loud they scream.
Your observation about guilt, boredom and the empty church are validation of my own perceptions as well…
People may become cynical about God and religion but that DOES NOT change the fact that we humans NEED a purpose, something to believe in and the fact that environmentalists are as ZEALOUS as they are simply illustrates that these same people would’ve been part of the Spanish Inquisition 500 years ago…
It was documented that during the 1964 Alaska earthquake which lasted FIVE minutes, that many people, after the first few minutes, got BORED and wondered when it would stop… Boredom is one of the few states of human nature that are more dangerous than many of the Seven Deadly Sins COMBINED…
I’m actually RE-READING the piece… Well done!!!
Thanks, Steve. The earthquake anecdote is brilliant – bored during an earthquake. That might be the most concise illustration of the problem I've seen. Appreciate the kind words and the re-read.
Thank you, absolutely brilliant. We all know something's not quite right. We see the streets filled with anything from marching theocracy apologists to hammer and sickle banners flying above the useful idiots. The more sinister side is evident as antifa shows it's face behind mask. It kind of looks like the mess on the streets of Germany post WW1 (Okay, that's an exaggeration) but who knows what Ubermensch may rise from the ashes of uncertainty.
The essay drew a clear, straight line from Foucault to today's over active immune system. Excellent.
Magnificent.
If someone tells me I know sweet FA in the future I'll ask them whether they've read Frederick Alexander's writing too.
Ha! Thanks, Rudolph.
“Postmodernism simply turned the body’s defences against itself. The capacity for self-criticism – essential for progress and error correction in a free and open society – became the disease, attacking the host organism rather than identifying and eliminating external pathogens.”
This is a very attractive analogy, but I don’t understand how post-modern critique differs in a qualitative sense from the regular skepticism and criticism necessary, as you said, for the “error correction” of a modern, liberal society.
Is it just the normal error correction taken to absurd extremes or is there something fundamentally different? I can’t seem to understand that point.
Fair question. The difference is that postmodern scepticism is aimed at the very principles that make scepticism possible – reason, objective truth, shared language, etc. Healthy error correction depends on those things remaining intact. Postmodernism makes an enemy of them, which is how you end up with relativism, "my truth" epistemology, and pregnant men.
So, yes, normal error correction taken to absurd extremes – but the qualitative difference is that ordinary scepticism questions specific claims while accepting the framework that makes questioning possible. Postmodernism questions the framework itself.
There's a parallel with Popper's paradox of tolerance. Tolerance is essential to an open society, but a tolerance of intolerance destroys it. Same logic.
Right, you touched on that, didn’t you?
The paradox created when they argue against reason and objective truth. If reason is just power domination and objective truth doesn’t exist, their arguments are just as subjective as everyone else’s.
Yes, pretty much. It eats itself in the end, or it should. A lot of it is intellectual masturbation, which can be fun in the seminar room. Less so (for the rest of us) when it enters the institutions.
Great piece. Here’s mine:
https://themaadmen.bandcamp.com/track/a-horse-is-a-horse