Perverse Postmodern Climate: Retreat from Reason

The recent marches for science were an amazing irony: People actually think that science is a matter of protesting in the streets. It was a demonstration all right, a full-throated display of postmodern contempt for reason, especially as embodied in the scientific method.

This virus has already taken over many universities, the most extreme case being Evergreen State College in Eastern Washington. Black students decided there should be a No White day on campus to protest the history of blacks mistreatment. One professor refused and tried to hold his class, arguing that free speech was not a matter of race, creed, gender or anything else. A riot erupted against him and his students, shutting down the class.

Afterward, the Evergreen State Faculty Turned on the Professor, Saying He ‘Endangered’ Students

This post is to call attention to a war correspondent issuing a recent report on the state of this cultural conflict. Professor Jordan Peterson of the University of Toronto writes from the front lines where higher education institutions and students are in upheaval.

Jordan Peterson: Why You Have To Fight Postmodernism
explains why young people need to organize and rise up against nihilistic postmodernism. The full transcript is worth reading, and a video presentation is also available. Some excerpts below present some of his key points.

JORDAN PETERSON: I want to recommend a book first to everyone here: It is called Explaining Postmodernism by Stephen Hicks. You need to understand postmodernism, because that’s what you’re up against. You’re up against it far more than you know or think, and it’s a much more well-developed and pervasive, pernicious, nihilistic, intellectually attractive doctrine than has yet come to public realization. It absolutely dominates the humanities and increasingly the social sciences in the universities.

It’s not like any given person is absolutely possessed by the spirit of postmodernism, because often they’re not educated enough to know all the details about what it is that has them in their grip, but if you get 20 of them together and they’re all 5% influenced by the postmodernist ethos, you basically have the spirit of the mob. It’s a mouthpiece for that particular philosophical doctrine.

See the postmodernists completely reject the structure of Western civilization. And I mean completely, so I can give you an example, in one term — Jacques Derrida. He is head trickster for the postmodernist movement, and he regarded Western culture — let’s call it the patriarchy — as phallogocentric. Phallo comes from phallus, and so that’s the insistence that what you see in Western culture is the consequence of the male-dominated oppressive self-serving society.

So the first thing that you might want to know about Postmodernism is that it doesn’t have a shred of gratitude — and there’s something pathologically wrong with a person that doesn’t have any gratitude, especially when they live in what so far is the best of all possible worlds. So if you’re not grateful, you’re driven by resentment, and resentment is the worst emotion that you can possibly experience, apart from arrogance. Arrogance, resentment, and deceit. There is an evil triad for you.

So you have to educate yourself about postmodernism.

So here’s what the postmodernists believe: They don’t believe in the individual. That’s the logos. Remember, Western culture is Phallogocentric. Logo is logos. That’s partly the Christian word, but is also partly the root word of logic.

They believe that logic is part of the process by which the patriarchal institutions of the West continue to dominate and to justify their dominance. They don’t believe in dialogue. The root word of dialogue is logos — again, they don’t believe that people of good will can come to consensus through the exchange of ideas. They believe that that notion is part of the philosophical substructure and practices of the dominant culture.

So the reason they don’t let people who they don’t agree with speak on campus, is because they don’t agree with letting people speak.

You see it’s not part of the ethos.

They believe that since you don’t have an individual identity, your fundamental identity is group fostered, and that means that you’re basically an exemplar of your race.

And so the postmodernist Marxists just basically pulled a sleight-of-hand, and said, ‘Okay if it’s not the poor against the rich than it’s the oppressed against the oppressor.’ We’ll just re-divide the sub-populations in ways that make our bloodied philosophy continue in its movement forward, and that’s where we are now.

So for the postmodernists, the world is a Hobbesian battleground of identity groups. They do not communicate with one another, because they can’t. All there is, is a struggle for power, and if you’re in the predator group, which means you’re an oppressor, than you better look out, because you’re not exactly welcome. Not exactly welcome, and neither are your ideas. So that’s what you’re up against.

You young people out there who are university students, you need to take over the student unions, you need to take them back, because they are absolute snake pits, and have been since the 1990s.

Our society needs to figure out how to stop shunting public tax money to radical left-wing activists. If we were doing that for the radical right-wing activists, there would be an absolute storm, but it’s happened incrementally since the 1960s and needs to stop.

So that’s what conservatives and also liberals –true liberals in the English sense– are up against. What’s happened also as a consequence of this postmodern neo-Marxist intellectual invasion, is the center keeps moving way to the right now, so if you’re a classical liberal, you’ve become a conservative.

Conclusion

And then finally with regards to talking to young people. You finally have something to sell to them. It is not easy to sell conservatism to young people, because they want to change things. That’s not what conservatives want to do, they want to maintain things. Well now you got something to sell — you can sell them freedom of speech, and you can tell sell them responsibility.

The left is selling them rights, you can sell them responsibility.

I can tell you, because I received many letters of this sort … young people are absolutely starving for someone to provide them with a sense of responsibility, and say look here, here’s something worth living for.

We’ve got this beacon of freedom and wealth in the West, which works, although it doesn’t work perfectly. And one of one of the responsibilities of young people is to find out what’s at the core of that, the great core of that. The paramount importance of the individual, and the divinity of speech. That’s something to sell, its what our whole culture is predicated on.

Footnote:

Tom Wolfe first opened my eyes to this assault on reason.  I posted on his essay along with the obvious connection to climate change/global warming.  See Warmists and Rococo Marxists