Form: Quote Commentary

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0983258406/ref=tsm_1_fb_lkFILLING THE HOLES IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT WILL KILL OFF POSTMODERNISM?

(Quote:)

“Showing that a [Postmodernism] leads to nihilism is an important part of understanding it, as is showing how a failing and nihilistic movement can still be dangerous.

“Tracing postmodernism’s roots back to Rousseau, Kant, and Marx explains how all of its elements came to be woven together. Yet identifying postmodernism’s roots and connecting them to contemporary bad consequences does not refute postmodernism. What is still needed is a refutation of those historical premises, and an identification and defense of the alternatives to them.

“The Enlightenment was based on premises opposite to those of postmodernism, but while the Enlightenment was able to create a magnificent world on the basis of those premises, it articulated and defended them only incompletely. That weakness is the sole source of postmodernism’s power against it.

“Completing the articulation and defense of those premises is therefore essential to maintaining the forward progress of the Enlightenment vision and shielding it against postmodern strategies.”

(FROM: Hicks, Stephen R. C. – Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault)

COMMENT

This is the last page of Stephen Hicks’ exceptionally accessible work on Postmodernism.

But for those in the Dark Enlightenment, and for those of us trying to articulate why the western social model produced the high trust society, and how we can preserve that high trust society against both the state and the errors of the enlightenment vision, that task is much harder than it sounds.

The reason being that we are not as marginally indifferent as the enlightenment philosophers argued. We are not separated by will and resource, but we are separated by ability, necessity, and preference, and that separation is irreconciliable with the institutions that the classical liberals gave us as an inheritance. We are saddled with multiple conflicts, and a rapidly diverging set of cultures, under an imperial bureaucracy, that is so well funded it is impossible to break, but equally impossible to use to cooperate.

Some of us are trying to develop institutions that will allow heterogeneous peoples with conflicting moral codes to cooperate as peacefully in the production of commons as they do in the market.

But the Postmodern vision is to empower tyranny in pursuit of a homogenous equalitarian utopia. which for the top and bottom may be attractive. But for the rest it is a net loss in all that we can desire, hope for and imagine.

SKEPTICISM

I am skeptical that it is at all possible to repair classical liberal institutions under representative majority rule. That system was invented to secure and hold power. But the question is, who will hold that power, and what will they do with it.

That is even more frightening than another dark age created by yet another version of an irrational religion.