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.
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.
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.
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).
Yes, it's a rich area – I barely scratched the surface in this article (tempted to revisit Lyotard and Baudrillard, who I only skated over very lightly back in the day).
It was interesting to research and write this piece, picking up the stuff I studied years ago as a philosophy student. Things looked very different then. I had no idea these ideas would creep into public and institutional discourse the way they have. None of us did.
Glad you stumbled on it, James. Do you write yourself? Seems there's a growing appetite for philosophically themed articles. I'm tempted to pick up Heidegger and Wittgenstein again, which were my main interests at the time.
I mention those two as I think there is something valid in their ideas, particularly when you consider Baudrilliard was into JG Ballard and Ballard reciprocated (plus The Matrix with its none too subtle riffing on Simulacra).
I don't recall Scruton writing on either, but one of the many strengths of Scruton's criticism was that he took the ideas of those he critiqued seriously, rather than just doing a hatchet job (as they undoubtedly would to him). Rare these days, but you do the same, which is why I'm drawn to your writing. If only you had written the book James Lindsey unfortunately did. Please do write more on philosophy.
I'm getting back into writing, mostly fiction, and will be doing something here soon.
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.
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.
"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.
Postmodernism was a legitimate critical tool that got institutionalized, which is fatal to any critical tool, because institutionalized critique becomes dogma. The immune system became the disease.
The three causes (guilt, boredom, empty church) are real but undersells the career incentive structure. Universities found that "studies" departments were cheap to run, generated tuition revenue, and produced administrators, not researchers who needed labs or tenure fights over falsifiable claims. The ideology spread because it was institutionally convenient, not just because people believed it.
The Butler paragraph is the best part of the piece. The deliberate incomprehensibility isn't a bug, it's rent-seeking: jargon creates a guild that controls access to the discourse.
I agree that career incentives played a big part in this – indeed, a whole industry has been built on it, something I've looked at in more depth elsewhere. It's why argument alone fails to make a dent: the status and financial incentives are just too strong.
Nietzsche, the great dismantler of Truth, was an aristocratic provocateur who wanted the strong to stop apologising. The postmodern baton passed to Foucault who directed the genealogical method at hospitals, prisons, and the structures of bourgeois knowledge. The woke inheritors took the framework and installed it as institutional orthodoxy, which is to say they did exactly what Foucault would have despised: turned radical scepticism into a new dogma, complete with catechism and heresy trials.
But I fear it's the latest handoff that matters most, that is the appropriation of these same tools (scepticism toward truth, suspicion of universalism, the reduction of knowledge to power) by the new right.
The woke left is a largely spent force. It lingers on American campuses, but as a political actor shaping the direction of Western societies it is receding fast. The new right, by contrast, is in power or approaching it across the democratic world - and it has a far deeper structural interest in postmodern epistemology than the left ever did. Because what stands as a barrier to the Great Men and to unconstrained capital and the commodification of everything? Norms. Standards. Shared truths. Democratic institutions. The embedded structures - legal, moral, professional, traditional - that place limits on what money and power can do. Every one of these is easier to dismantle once you've established that truth is just narrative and norms are just power dressed up in Sunday clothes.
The left's historical project, for all its internal quarrels, is fundamentally normative . The left wants a moral economy, democratic constraints, a society where power answers to something beyond itself. Parts of the left borrowed postmodern tools to unmask ideologies that legitimised domination, but it never fully escaped the contradiction: you cannot deconstruct all foundations and then build a just order on the rubble. The right has no such problem. Fascism and unrestrained capitalism are NOT normative project. They they are appetites. They don't need foundations. They need the removal of obstacles. And postmodernism, with its assault on every standard, every shared truth, every claim to moral authority, is the most efficient obstacle-removal program ever devised.
The baton, it turns out, has come home. Nietzsche wanted to free the strong from the tyranny of slave morality. A century and a half later, the strongest men on earth (not the philosophers he imagined, but billionaires and demagogues) are using his tools to do exactly that.
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, 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 is such a great piece. I did a degree in Media Studies at the university of Sussex in the 1990s - say no more, it was a hotbed of postmodernism. It was like a game - so easy to play once you knew the rules, but essentially pointless. Everything is a comment on everything else, nothing is real, blah blah.
I just had no idea it would end up being in charge of the way we live. What a crazy world.
How much pure poison did Parisian post-WW2 philosophers inject into the world's blood stream!? They turned the Pierian Spring, our natural headwaters of culture and wisdom, into a toxic waste dump by polluting it with nothing but Mephistophealian sophistry where lies are truth, death is life, and empty, sterile poses are no different from action and creation.
I guess being conquered by Germans three times in 70ish years (1871, 1914, and 1940) crushed their spirits so bad that all that was left was some combo of raging Thanatos with the echt Parisian urge to perform their hatred of the bourgeoisie through repeated acts of Sadean destruction, dressed up in the language of romantic decadence.
I don't think the French have ever recovered from 1789. It's sort of like the 1960s hippie who still lives in his VW van, eats acid for breakfast and won't shut up about Dylan—they can never live up to their glorious past yet can never let it go and never stop trying to recreate it. They are frozen in time and only grow more preposterous.
But even the most absurd hippie is not as ridiculous as the misshapen Parisian chimera called the "Marxist intellectual" who imagines himself dragging his class enemies to the guillotine but who in reality has never left the library and the only members of the proletariat he knows are his servants. At least the Jacobins, De Sade (and even hippies) had skin in the game, the "Marxist intellectual" and the Foucault/Derrida deconstructers have always been cowards who hide behind Western power and prosperity while using other people's blood for the ink to craft their tedious tomes of revolutionary onanism (which are comedic performances only taken seriously by gullible and insecure foreigners).
The West spent the back half of the 20th century worried about nukes, nuclear war and nuclear fallout, when the real existential threat was coming from the Sorbonne. We should have walled that place off for a century a la Chernobyl and let the theorist class eat each other literally instead of metaphorically.
I always enjoy your comments, CP – as I'm sure others do here. Thanks for this, and I'm stealing 'revolutionary onanism', or at least borrowing it, if you don't mind.
In case you couldn’t tell, I’m second to no one in my loathing for the French frauds and foolosophers. I majored in Lit at a snooty liberal arts college back in the 80s and I’ll never forget when I was first exposed to their dishonest pseudoradical jargon—teaching this in place of real Literature was like buying a nice new TV, taking it home, then throwing it in the garbage while devoting the rest of your days to arguing over the instruction manual.
It wasn’t until many years later that I realized this was all a giant status game for disaffected bourgeois children, who needed to maintain their pretensions about being edgy, radical egalitarians while not having to sacrifice any cash or comfort. The Permanent Revolution had renounced the workers by this point and moved onto campus and this is how and why all oppression suddenly moved into language and texts. But as I was from a working-class background and there to read and learn, I mostly ignored them and am still in shock that this self-refuting and simplistic ideology has become the sacred faith of an entire generation. But of course I was never the intended target audience (as I also learned many years later): I wasn’t rich enough to be a socialist! :)
Thanks for the great work and kind words, and always feel free to steal.
Pol Pot was educated in Paris (if I recall correctly) and some Parisian soi-disant radical pimped for every Leftist petty tyrant from Mao to Castro to Arafat and Khomeini etc. They are very generous with other people's blood!
Pol Pol (not his real name) won a scholarship to study engineering in Paris but found Marxism before he even took his exams. Then went home to destroy is country...
Regarding Foucault, a book in 1993 called "the passions of M. F." By Jim Miller , sets out to discover whether the rumor is true, that Foucault had sex with men in bathhouses even when he was dying from AIDS.
Finally, in the end, he meets some lover of F who confirms he did just that. F called it limit-experience, another one of his made up words.
Maybe an overlooked aspect of F that some didn't believe even at the time. But why wouldn't they believe it? F was a person fixated on torture, BDSM, and sex. As a student he worked under paintings by Goya. He wrote a text on a French youngster who killed his family, and F said that through the murderer's autobiography, the murder became art.
Not to forget that F own writing was so happy in describing torture that I don't know how anyone can overlook it. (I found it so disturbing that I stopped reading after a few pages. Maybe it was his book on crime and punishment)
If we want to understand F, we should do it by investigating his own life. It is wrong to think F was a communist, or that his purpose was to undermine Western civilization . No, he was motivated by personal need to understand torture, power and sex.
Thanks, Fredrik. I suspect you're right. Foucault's psychological makeup is, I'm convinced, a very significant part in all this and also the thing that travels. There's a lot of speculation on that side of things, as you say (although I haven't read that book), including some really sinister stuff that I won't get into here but allude to in the footnotes.
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.
Good non-fiction writing should be clear and understandable. Butler's inane babblings are purposefully obtuse and obscure. They are intended to obfuscate, not elucidate.
Great synopsis of Postmodernism, thank you! But I'll suggest that Postmodernism itself is itself another product metastasized from the Frankfurt School - founded and funded by Felix Weil out of the ashes of WW1 in 1923 : seeking to explain with neo-Marxist thought why Capitalist society had not risen up in revolution as predicted. And by 1932 Critical Theory was invented as 'umiversal solvent' spawning all you've articulated above. (PS fled into self-imposed exile ahead of rising tide of Nazism to the USA. Columbia University in NYC offered welcoming environment where they built a cozy nest where they continued nurturing this insanity unto this very day.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Yes, it's a rich area – I barely scratched the surface in this article (tempted to revisit Lyotard and Baudrillard, who I only skated over very lightly back in the day).
It was interesting to research and write this piece, picking up the stuff I studied years ago as a philosophy student. Things looked very different then. I had no idea these ideas would creep into public and institutional discourse the way they have. None of us did.
Glad you stumbled on it, James. Do you write yourself? Seems there's a growing appetite for philosophically themed articles. I'm tempted to pick up Heidegger and Wittgenstein again, which were my main interests at the time.
I mention those two as I think there is something valid in their ideas, particularly when you consider Baudrilliard was into JG Ballard and Ballard reciprocated (plus The Matrix with its none too subtle riffing on Simulacra).
I don't recall Scruton writing on either, but one of the many strengths of Scruton's criticism was that he took the ideas of those he critiqued seriously, rather than just doing a hatchet job (as they undoubtedly would to him). Rare these days, but you do the same, which is why I'm drawn to your writing. If only you had written the book James Lindsey unfortunately did. Please do write more on philosophy.
I'm getting back into writing, mostly fiction, and will be doing something here soon.
Have you read Neil Postman on technology?
Frederick I think your Guardian joke could go viral! With your permission I'd like to borrow it!
Sure, go ahead 😃
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/
Thank you for that! What an excellent read. I will have to track down his books as well
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.
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.
"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.
Postmodernism was a legitimate critical tool that got institutionalized, which is fatal to any critical tool, because institutionalized critique becomes dogma. The immune system became the disease.
The three causes (guilt, boredom, empty church) are real but undersells the career incentive structure. Universities found that "studies" departments were cheap to run, generated tuition revenue, and produced administrators, not researchers who needed labs or tenure fights over falsifiable claims. The ideology spread because it was institutionally convenient, not just because people believed it.
The Butler paragraph is the best part of the piece. The deliberate incomprehensibility isn't a bug, it's rent-seeking: jargon creates a guild that controls access to the discourse.
I agree that career incentives played a big part in this – indeed, a whole industry has been built on it, something I've looked at in more depth elsewhere. It's why argument alone fails to make a dent: the status and financial incentives are just too strong.
Nietzsche, the great dismantler of Truth, was an aristocratic provocateur who wanted the strong to stop apologising. The postmodern baton passed to Foucault who directed the genealogical method at hospitals, prisons, and the structures of bourgeois knowledge. The woke inheritors took the framework and installed it as institutional orthodoxy, which is to say they did exactly what Foucault would have despised: turned radical scepticism into a new dogma, complete with catechism and heresy trials.
But I fear it's the latest handoff that matters most, that is the appropriation of these same tools (scepticism toward truth, suspicion of universalism, the reduction of knowledge to power) by the new right.
The woke left is a largely spent force. It lingers on American campuses, but as a political actor shaping the direction of Western societies it is receding fast. The new right, by contrast, is in power or approaching it across the democratic world - and it has a far deeper structural interest in postmodern epistemology than the left ever did. Because what stands as a barrier to the Great Men and to unconstrained capital and the commodification of everything? Norms. Standards. Shared truths. Democratic institutions. The embedded structures - legal, moral, professional, traditional - that place limits on what money and power can do. Every one of these is easier to dismantle once you've established that truth is just narrative and norms are just power dressed up in Sunday clothes.
The left's historical project, for all its internal quarrels, is fundamentally normative . The left wants a moral economy, democratic constraints, a society where power answers to something beyond itself. Parts of the left borrowed postmodern tools to unmask ideologies that legitimised domination, but it never fully escaped the contradiction: you cannot deconstruct all foundations and then build a just order on the rubble. The right has no such problem. Fascism and unrestrained capitalism are NOT normative project. They they are appetites. They don't need foundations. They need the removal of obstacles. And postmodernism, with its assault on every standard, every shared truth, every claim to moral authority, is the most efficient obstacle-removal program ever devised.
The baton, it turns out, has come home. Nietzsche wanted to free the strong from the tyranny of slave morality. A century and a half later, the strongest men on earth (not the philosophers he imagined, but billionaires and demagogues) are using his tools to do exactly that.
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, 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 is such a great piece. I did a degree in Media Studies at the university of Sussex in the 1990s - say no more, it was a hotbed of postmodernism. It was like a game - so easy to play once you knew the rules, but essentially pointless. Everything is a comment on everything else, nothing is real, blah blah.
I just had no idea it would end up being in charge of the way we live. What a crazy world.
"Easy to play once you knew the rules" is exactly it. And everyone's playing the game in the institutions now. Crazy world indeed.
How much pure poison did Parisian post-WW2 philosophers inject into the world's blood stream!? They turned the Pierian Spring, our natural headwaters of culture and wisdom, into a toxic waste dump by polluting it with nothing but Mephistophealian sophistry where lies are truth, death is life, and empty, sterile poses are no different from action and creation.
I guess being conquered by Germans three times in 70ish years (1871, 1914, and 1940) crushed their spirits so bad that all that was left was some combo of raging Thanatos with the echt Parisian urge to perform their hatred of the bourgeoisie through repeated acts of Sadean destruction, dressed up in the language of romantic decadence.
I don't think the French have ever recovered from 1789. It's sort of like the 1960s hippie who still lives in his VW van, eats acid for breakfast and won't shut up about Dylan—they can never live up to their glorious past yet can never let it go and never stop trying to recreate it. They are frozen in time and only grow more preposterous.
But even the most absurd hippie is not as ridiculous as the misshapen Parisian chimera called the "Marxist intellectual" who imagines himself dragging his class enemies to the guillotine but who in reality has never left the library and the only members of the proletariat he knows are his servants. At least the Jacobins, De Sade (and even hippies) had skin in the game, the "Marxist intellectual" and the Foucault/Derrida deconstructers have always been cowards who hide behind Western power and prosperity while using other people's blood for the ink to craft their tedious tomes of revolutionary onanism (which are comedic performances only taken seriously by gullible and insecure foreigners).
The West spent the back half of the 20th century worried about nukes, nuclear war and nuclear fallout, when the real existential threat was coming from the Sorbonne. We should have walled that place off for a century a la Chernobyl and let the theorist class eat each other literally instead of metaphorically.
I always enjoy your comments, CP – as I'm sure others do here. Thanks for this, and I'm stealing 'revolutionary onanism', or at least borrowing it, if you don't mind.
In case you couldn’t tell, I’m second to no one in my loathing for the French frauds and foolosophers. I majored in Lit at a snooty liberal arts college back in the 80s and I’ll never forget when I was first exposed to their dishonest pseudoradical jargon—teaching this in place of real Literature was like buying a nice new TV, taking it home, then throwing it in the garbage while devoting the rest of your days to arguing over the instruction manual.
It wasn’t until many years later that I realized this was all a giant status game for disaffected bourgeois children, who needed to maintain their pretensions about being edgy, radical egalitarians while not having to sacrifice any cash or comfort. The Permanent Revolution had renounced the workers by this point and moved onto campus and this is how and why all oppression suddenly moved into language and texts. But as I was from a working-class background and there to read and learn, I mostly ignored them and am still in shock that this self-refuting and simplistic ideology has become the sacred faith of an entire generation. But of course I was never the intended target audience (as I also learned many years later): I wasn’t rich enough to be a socialist! :)
Thanks for the great work and kind words, and always feel free to steal.
Cheers
Look at all the connections and support between post WWII French philosophers and the Khmer Rouge. Poison spread very widely indeed.
Pol Pot was educated in Paris (if I recall correctly) and some Parisian soi-disant radical pimped for every Leftist petty tyrant from Mao to Castro to Arafat and Khomeini etc. They are very generous with other people's blood!
Pol Pol (not his real name) won a scholarship to study engineering in Paris but found Marxism before he even took his exams. Then went home to destroy is country...
Oh David I was going to say exactly the same thing!
Thank you, well put.
Regarding Foucault, a book in 1993 called "the passions of M. F." By Jim Miller , sets out to discover whether the rumor is true, that Foucault had sex with men in bathhouses even when he was dying from AIDS.
Finally, in the end, he meets some lover of F who confirms he did just that. F called it limit-experience, another one of his made up words.
Maybe an overlooked aspect of F that some didn't believe even at the time. But why wouldn't they believe it? F was a person fixated on torture, BDSM, and sex. As a student he worked under paintings by Goya. He wrote a text on a French youngster who killed his family, and F said that through the murderer's autobiography, the murder became art.
Not to forget that F own writing was so happy in describing torture that I don't know how anyone can overlook it. (I found it so disturbing that I stopped reading after a few pages. Maybe it was his book on crime and punishment)
If we want to understand F, we should do it by investigating his own life. It is wrong to think F was a communist, or that his purpose was to undermine Western civilization . No, he was motivated by personal need to understand torture, power and sex.
Thanks, Fredrik. I suspect you're right. Foucault's psychological makeup is, I'm convinced, a very significant part in all this and also the thing that travels. There's a lot of speculation on that side of things, as you say (although I haven't read that book), including some really sinister stuff that I won't get into here but allude to in the footnotes.
Just breathtakingly brilliant.
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.
Good non-fiction writing should be clear and understandable. Butler's inane babblings are purposefully obtuse and obscure. They are intended to obfuscate, not elucidate.
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
Great synopsis of Postmodernism, thank you! But I'll suggest that Postmodernism itself is itself another product metastasized from the Frankfurt School - founded and funded by Felix Weil out of the ashes of WW1 in 1923 : seeking to explain with neo-Marxist thought why Capitalist society had not risen up in revolution as predicted. And by 1932 Critical Theory was invented as 'umiversal solvent' spawning all you've articulated above. (PS fled into self-imposed exile ahead of rising tide of Nazism to the USA. Columbia University in NYC offered welcoming environment where they built a cozy nest where they continued nurturing this insanity unto this very day.
That's a very interesting observation, DAL – thanks. I might revisit this in another piece at some point.
My feelings also. The insanity we’re living through has been brewing for decades.