How The Lazies Grift Their Way (And That Of Their Followers) Into Power By Making Achievement Meaningless
Steven Hicks gets it -- what po-mo thinking and all the academic departments pushing it are all about.
As I've put it, it's ultimately about a push for unearned power over others.
In Hicks' words at James Martin Center:
Postmodernism is a sprawling movement centered on the conviction that the modern world's most distinctive achievements--among them the rise of science, technology, individualism, universal rights, democratic-republicanism, and liberal capitalism--should be treated with suspicion or outright contempt.
Its origins:
Philosophers Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida, and others cast a suspicious eye upon "truth" and substituted group-relativized "narratives"--lamenting that those narratives are usually in brutal conflict with each other. We cannot escape our "ethnocentric predicament," Rorty claimed: "We must, in practice, privilege our own group." Others asserted that race or gender or class divides were more fundamental.That is the first step: Truth is out, and racial/gender/class/ethnic-group conflict prevails. But then, what is the purpose of education?
Foucault was explicit about the implications of the death of truth. Shortly after leaving the Communist Party, he tells us, he followed the lead of his semi-mentor Jean-Paul Sartre: "Sartre renounced all philosophical speculation properly speaking and invested his own philosophical activity in behavior that was political."
That is the second step: We should politicize education.
But what kind of politics? For the first-generation postmoderns, orthodox Marxism was no longer tenable. Something new was needed--something, as deconstructionist Derrida put it, "in the spirit of Marxism"--but without its clunky baggage. Keep Marxism's themes of exploitation and oppression and its relentless antagonism toward current civilization--but abandon its faith in science, its claim that economics is fundamental, and its belief that the inevitable march of history would bring the revolution. Only subversive Action Now! would effect the transformation.
The next-generation postmodernists got busy. They had learned from Foucault, Rorty, and Derrida that they should abandon truth for narratives, individuals for groups, and politicize the classroom with some sort of quasi-Marxism. And then Herbert Marcuse and Jean-François Lyotard taught them to work within the system rather than positioning themselves as revolutionaries imposing from the outside. Join the system's leading institutions and, from inside positions of power, rework its ethos.
And the ruin being laid:
Two professors, Breanne Fahs and Michael Karger, forthrightly urge as a "pedagogical priority" that we train students to "serve as symbolic 'viruses' that infect, unsettle, and disrupt traditional and entrenched fields."...[Indoctrinated graduating students] feel in their bones that the system is oppressive, that they are being set up for failure by sinister forces, that everyone loathes everyone else--and they have neither been exposed much to other ideologies nor trained how to evaluate them. Thrust unprepared into a hostile world, it makes perfect sense that their protests will be manifestations of their internal rages and despairs.
These students are being set up for failure -- by being turned into cogs in the po-mo machine, who can't think for themselves or do anything of value. In fact, they've been turned into exactly the employees no sane employer would want -- which makes them fit only to fire up the diversity machine...if only they can get one of those (rather numerous) cushy jobs in the Diversity Industrial Complex of academia.
Otherwise, look for them at the Antifa riot nearest you, complaining about the cruelty of capitalism...into their iPhone, paid for by their mom.
Not for taunting… It was for looking so much like Buff C-Bath.
But seriously... Wasn't Foucault or Derrida or one of those "The text has no meaning" guys posthumously discovered to have been a Nazi sympathizer? Never read any of their books and can't recall the details. But yeah, losing WWII has gotta shake your foundations.
Crid at March 30, 2019 11:01 PM
but abandon its faith in science
Lysenko called. He said, in Soviet Russia, science services the state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
I R A Darth Aggie at March 31, 2019 9:56 AM
You may be thinking of Jean Paul Sartre, who while not sympathetic to the Nazis, was hardly a darling of the resistance either, "In 1939, 1940, we were terrified of dying, suffering, for a cause that disgusted us. That is, for a disgusting France, corrupt, inefficient, racist, anti-Semite, run by the rich for the rich—no one wanted to die for that, until, well, until we understood that the Nazis were worse."
Conan the Grammarian at March 31, 2019 10:02 AM
Crid are you thinking of Heidegger? He's often associated w/ the PoMo's but predates them, and yes he was an avowed Nazi.
mormon at March 31, 2019 12:21 PM
They want to tear civilization down because it is not perfect and does not honor them sufficiently. They should go visit a place where civ is collapsing and see how they like it. People like them are not the winners in such a system.
cc at March 31, 2019 1:35 PM
Crid:
You're thinking of Paul DeMan, a Belgian-American literary critic who is credited with developing the technique of deconstruction, together with French philosopher Jacques Derrida. DeMan began his career as a journalist in Belgium during the Nazi occupation but made his reputation as a scholar in post-WWII America.
As Wikipedia notes: "After his death, a researcher uncovered some two hundred previously unknown articles which de Man had written in his early twenties for Belgian collaborationist newspapers during World War II, some of them implicitly and two explicitly anti-Semitic. These, in combination with revelations about his domestic life and financial history, caused a scandal and provoked a reconsideration of his life and work."
Dale at March 31, 2019 5:52 PM
> thinking of Heidegger?
Mebbe....
> You're thinking of Paul DeMan
Yep, that's probably the one. I remembered that he was central to the French Deekers.
Crid at March 31, 2019 11:51 PM
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