SIO53: What Is Postmodernism? With Aaron Rabi

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode number 53. I'm your host Thomas Smith. Alright, today I am really excited to bring you a conversation with Aaron Rabi, or I guess he pronounces it Rabi, on postmodernism. So much of the criticism, when we talk about the gender studies hoax, a lot of other things, a lot of Jordan B. Peterson's criticism, so much of it comes down to postmodernism is taking over academia and it's a huge problem. And I couldn't help but wonder just what exactly is postmodernism. And I wanted to do kind of a basics on it. And Aaron has done some reading, done some research. He also has, of course, a background in philosophy. And he's here to take us through it. So just what is postmodernism? Let's find out. Joining me now is Aaron Rabi. He's of the Embrace the Void podcast. How you doing Aaron?

0:01:28 Aaron: I'm doing great, Thomas. How are you doing?

0:01:31 Thomas: Doing great and Aaron has been on. Oh, is it two times before or one time before I can't remember.

0:01:36 Aaron: It's, it's been a couple of times now. We did the consequentialism episode and we did the episode about free will. I always love coming on, uh, Serious Inquiries Only.

0:01:40 Thomas: Oh Yeah Yeah, it's awesome some, yeah, let's, well, in that spirit, yeah. No.

0:01:54 Aaron: Yeah, what are we gonna stir up today, Thomas?

0:01:54 Thomas: Yeah. Let's start some rumors about, you know, skating atheists or something. So Aaron's, yeah you've been kind of the, the philosopher on call here to kind of educate us about philosophical topics from time to time. And it's been really cool. Also should note that, you now, I've, I have been on your show. Let see, by the time this airs it should be out. So go check out Embrace the Void. And if you're someone who hates the musical Hamilton, maybe go check it out. If you like it, then you're then don't check it out because you'll just hate me. So that's my plug for it. But you can plug your version of that, too.

0:02:19 Aaron: Yeah.

0:02:32 Aaron: If you like very thoughtful dialogue about a wonderful but complicated show, and lots of people made good points and everyone was thoughtful and no one called anyone a cuck and it was great. Sure.

0:02:38 Thomas: Yeah. All So all that being said, with the recent, I would say there's a lot going on. There's the gender studies paper that talked about the topic of postmodernism. And there's a lot of what Jordan B. Peterson with Bill C-16, that Bill C-16, like a lot of his rhetoric involves, you know, slamming postmodern ism as the end of society and stuff like that. And some people posted some stuff on my Facebook like, hey, maybe you should look into postmodern ism because it, you, know, it's not necessarily what these people are making out to be. So, I thought, yeah, let's do that. So I just want to ask you, what is postmodernism? Because if I were to go on the version based on just what I'm getting from all these people arguing about these things, it sounds like any word means anything and there's no strict, rigid definitions to set. That's how people are using it. Postmodernism is an infection of our language where anything can mean anything, that kind of thing.

0:03:35 Aaron: Yeah. And, and like, what I'm gonna say is the straw man they're building, like most straw men, is based on something in reality, but it's not accurate to what actually is there. I think, um, to explain it, I think we got to do a little bit of history of philosophy and go back. And because, like, if you're talking about post-modernism, the first question should be, post what? What what is the modernism that it's post?

So we have to, I think, understand modernism and and sort of the modern age, and then from there we want to talk about what is post-modernism a reaction to within modernism, if that makes sense. Uh, so we're going to do a bunch of, like, wild over generalization about, uh, several hundred years of human history, um. And that, that first of all, I want to point out that these are the kind of terms that, like, philosophers hate, because they're vague, vague, ill-defined generational philosophical terms that refer to a broad group of individuals, not all of whom would self-identify that way. And it, you know, like, it lumps in people who believe very different things sometimes, so that's a problem. Anything that I say here, you're going to get someone on your Facebook who's going to say that's not an accurate portrayal of post-modernism or something like that, because again, these are just ill-defined concepts to some, some degree, um, but

0:04:51 Aaron: We can talk somewhat usefully about them and

0:04:51 Thomas: Okay, so it's more like a wide category of philosophers, kind of? Is that what it is?

0:04:58 Aaron: Yeah, not just philosophers, but philosophers, artists, it's a, it's wide category of, like, a cultural movement is the way to think about these, um, and one way to thing about this is that this is just the next iteration of an ongoing cultural dialogue, or what they would call the dialectic, back and forth, in this case between, between the part of us that wants to maintain what has worked in the past via tradition and the part of us wants to challenge what hasn't worked in the past by deconstructing it and trying something new.

0:05:07 Thomas: Okay. Hmm.

0:05:34 Aaron: So it's just another version of that. And what I sort of want people to understand is that, like, modernism, when we think of the modern age, what we are thinking of is a movement that kind of arose in the 1800s up through the 1900s, where things like science and the Enlightenment reason, all of this sort of stuff, created a pushback on a lot of traditional dogmas and created what we think of as a lot of modern age thinking.

Modernism has understood roughly how we culturally really understand it, right, we're thinking of, like, the Industrial Revolution, the changes in, what, you know, like, human rights laws, that kind of stuff, uh, the modern progressive, uh, liberal western world is what we would think of as arising in the, the modernist period of cultural development, and this goes along with, like, the artistic modernists, like, um, the Cubists, uh, the Futurists, individuals like that who were deconstructing, like, so, so modernism is a form of deconstructive philosophy. It took older traditions and it looked at the forms and it broke them down some and tried to figure out new things that worked, given the new situations we were facing.

0:06:50 Thomas: Yeah, I mean, that does sound incredibly general, I guess. I mean, is that just because this is an ill-defined term, or is it the constraints of time?

0:06:50 Aaron: Right. Yeah. No.

0:07:01 Thomas: I mean would we be able to look at some sort of example, like specific example of any of this?

0:07:03 Aaron: Yeah. So, like, a definition of modernism goes something like this, this is one that I found, um. "Modernism explicitly rejects the ideology of realism and makes use of the works of the past by the employment of reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision, and parody. A notable characteristic of modernism is self-consciousness and irony concerning literary and social traditions, which led to experiments with form, along with the use of technique," etc, etc. So, that's sort of the artistic, right, and you want, what you want to understand is that modernism applies both to scientific modernism and artistic modernism. They were informing each other and happening at the same time in human history and so

0:07:32 Thomas: Yeah, so that sounds more art-based, right? Like more, yeah.

0:07:50 Thomas: I know this could end up being just an infinite regression, progression. But what, how would you define quickly realism then, since that was what modernism was, was reversing

0:07:52 Aaron: Yeah and this is, this is talking about realism in the sense of, like, what we think of as objective, objectivist moral realism would be one example. So, so when we think of the modern age as rejecting the rigid dogmatic morality of religion and replacing it with a secular progressive morality that, um, takes into account, you know, what's going on on the ground for human beings rather than old ancient texts, that's a form of modernist rejection of what we would think of as traditional realism. So, um, pluralism as a cultural idea, multiculturalism. These are rejections of the rigid realism of a pre-modernist society. Other examples are stuff like, like I said, the Cubist artists who were creating beautiful art by explicitly sort of challenging and rejecting the traditions of the art world. But also, like, moral art pieces like the Rites of Spring, where you have an artistic piece that touches on and expresses subjects that are very culturally transgressive. And merely by expressing those culturally transgresive issues, you are challenging those traditional dogmas.

0:08:03 Thomas: Okay okay Now we're talking, we're taking Stravinsky, right? Oh, I well, I'm a I'ma, huge fan of Right of Spring, so maybe maybe maybe I'm into this modernism thing

0:09:14 Aaron: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Great. Then that's that's a great example of modernism. Yeah. And that's the thing. That's one thing I want your listeners to take away from this, is that each of these movements had important truths that we don't want to lose. Modernism replaced Wu with empiricism, for example. One of the big, like, modernism isn't just about lovey-arty deconstruction. It's also about the scientific model replacing, you know, "well, I believe whatever I want to believe," basically. It was, what can you reproduce and what testable, provable results can you get? And when you think about the overreach of modernism, what you want to think about is the good of those kinds of ideas, both the deconstructing and the good of the scientific model, being taken to an extreme and then becoming the dogma that we then have to push back against. Does that make sense?

0:09:22 Thomas: Yeah okay yeah I was gonna say, because this is setting up as, okay, this, this modernism thing sounds pretty, pretty cool. And I could see why so far in what you're telling me, like, oh, if there's some sort of postmodernism, which rejects a lot, you know, rejects science or reject, you know, I could say, you could see that straw man being built where it might appeal to to to some people. OK.

0:10:19 Aaron: Mm hmm. Mm hmm, mm hmm, exactly. Exactly. And it's my belief that when we get to the talk about what comes next, the people who are against postmodernism who are speaking out at this particular place and time, most of them want to go back to a kind of classical modernism that I think is unhealthy. And then instead we want to move towards a more synthetic development that merges the value of modernism with the value OF postmodern ism, basically. But yeah, so what is postmodernism then going to reject within modernism? Because that's the question, right? The next movement comes along and it attacks whatever was problematic or incomplete about the last stage of the cultural development. So while modernism was great in some ways, it gets other things wrong. For example, it assumed that science was going to solve all the problems.

So when you think of like naive scientism, you're thinking of the problems of modernism, like the people who thought that like science could give us full fully fleshed out answers to all the problems of morality or something like that, you can start to look at the ideas, or like that we could scientifically calculate, you race realism, things like that are parts of the sort of the darker side of modernity, that we thought that science would give full explanations, and then we ignored that science could in self be a form of cultural bias. So that was probably the one of the most effective parts of the post-modernist movement, was to say, hey, guys, even though we've achieved amazing things through modern science and Western modern thinking, this is still a culturally isolated first-person perspective. It still has biases in it,

0:10:50 Thomas: Hmm. OK. Right.

0:12:14 Aaron: And some of our conclusions as a result are flawed because of those biases. Fantasies.

0:12:20 Thomas: Now, I'm not history is not my strong suit, but I'm just wondering, is part of this rejection of modernism? Did any of it stem from like, you know, eugenics and that kind of thing, like that viewed as science going too far or anything, or is it not the right timeline?

0:12:34 Aaron: Yeah, no, Absolutely. So part of the postmodern, and it's weird because you'll see that like some of the Postmodernism sort of dips into legitimately what they're talking about when they talk about like nihilism, where it just stops caring about anyone. But a lot of Postmodernist is based in a very humanistic reaction to the inhumanity of Modernism, much the same way that that modernism was a humanistic reaction to the inhumanities of things like World War I.

0:13:03 Thomas: Okay.

0:13:04 Aaron: So postmodernism looks at the kind of naive scientism that gets the results that a woman has a lower IQ than a man and assumes that that's evidence that women are just dumber than men, rather than that IQ tests involve some sort of intrinsic cultural biases and aren't accurately reflecting intelligence between individuals that's that's a functional postmodern critique. No,

0:13:26 Thomas: Hmm. If, okay. I don't know if this is a good time to ask this, but now I'm curious because another thing that, uh, now I, I'm going to link a video of Jordan B. Peterson that I watched, which is him foaming at the mouth while talking about postmodernism. And that's not even that much of an exaggeration. Are you with me?

0:13:46 Thomas: He looks like a fire and brimstone preacher. He really does. And he's speaking to some sort of conservative conference or something, like a conservative group. And, uh, he says we need to fear postmodernism and all this stuff. And what he always uses, right after he says postmodernist, almost every time he'll say neo-Marxist or or something like that, like every single time. And I'm just wondering, how does how does that factor in? Do you know? I mean, because I think of Karl Marx

0:13:46 Aaron: He's quite, quite unhinged. He's very angry, yeah, Yeah, right,

0:14:19 Thomas: And like he he it sounds seems like he was dead long before even the modernism part. So why is is is Marxism key to postmodernism?

0:14:26 Aaron: First of all, the postmodern saturnist in me needs to point out that that video is evidence that, um, we have all known that there's a emotional problem with men, and that men are just a little too emotional and that they have have trouble being rational sometimes, and it's not their fault, but they really shouldn't be in charge of academia because they clearly have emotional problems, um, that

0:14:44 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. You know, I have to say it because it just reminded me of it now. But the other week when there wonder, I'm sorry. I'm not into comic books. Wonder, Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman. I almost said Wonder Girl.

0:14:57 Aaron: Wonder Woman Wonder Woman, you're doing great,

0:15:00 Thomas: Sorry.

0:15:00 Aaron: Man, you're done great. Wonder Wonder person, we

0:15:01 Thomas: Uh, what? No, I see. I literally almost said wonder girl. I was like, is that right? No. I don't. It's, and it's because I hate comic book movies. Not because I, yeah. But, uh there was a thing on like the daily show or something where a girl, uh said like, yeah, we'll know we're equal when people, we can make a female led, you know, superhero movie and have it suck and then still make another one. And she's like, nobody after Superman versus Batman, no one was like, all right, I guess we're done with male comic book movies. Like I guess men can't work in the box office. So it's sort of that I've along with, it just reminded me of that, but I felt compelled to mention it.

0:15:11 Aaron: Yeah, No, That's No, that good, because it answers the Marxist question that you were were asking, actually, which is, no, I'm not, I'm not even, I'm serious now.

0:15:43 Thomas: Oh, okay, good.

0:15:45 Aaron: I've gone back. So that's the problem with post-modernism, you can't tell when I'm being sarcastic. Um, there's another part to post- modernism that is about cultural deconstruction. So people like Derrida, who are sort of at the core, Derrida and Foucault, who are at the heart of post-mortem modernism, a lot of the continental philosophers, what they were trying to show is that literature, like science, like everything thing else, is within a structural framework and has certain inbred assumptions as a result of that structural framework, and always needs to be analyzed and understood within that structural framework. So the kind of deconstructive cultural analysis that allows you to say, here's how we'll know when things are equal, when people won't say, oh, that woman movie sucked, therefore we're never going to make another woman movie.

That's a good postmodern deconstructual analysis of cultural assumptions, you see what I mean, so, like there's a lot of very useful stuff in post-modernism, it really does, it, post-modernism is essentially going, it's skepticism, right, this is the stupid part of all of this, these guys are skeptics and what they're attacking is skepticism, fundamentally, they're attaching the skeptical idea that, um, we are not actually all rational agents with objective views who are really good at selecting against our own biases, etc, etc, which we all agree with when we want to, right on our side, on our site, at least we

0:15:49 Thomas: Yeah, true.

0:16:39 Thomas: Interesting. Yeah. But, yeah. Yeah

0:17:13 Aaron: All try to, you know, we all admit that we so

0:17:13 Thomas: But, but what about the Marxist part of it? Did I miss that?

0:17:18 Aaron: I mean, so I think the Marxist part of it is that, like, a lot of the people who got into post-modern deconstruction were deconstructing capitalism, and they were deconstructing the assumptions about capitalist society as the epitome of cultural evolution, and they were deconstructed the immorality of wage slave kind of capitalism, all that sort of stuff. And so they were drawing on a lot of Marxist elements, and these guys are pandering to right-wing conservatives, and therefore pandering a world view that still thinks that capitalism is everything, and and we shouldn't question any of its cultural assumptions at all. And so, so they're, they're lumping in that as part of their attack.

0:17:59 Aaron: I think that's how I that's how I make sense of what they're getting at right there. They're trying to they're trying to attack the attack on what we would think of as the the modern Western culture circa, you know, 1995, right right at the peak of like rationalist male dominated Western culture. And then since then, we've done a lot of deconstructing of all of that. And they're not happy about all that deconstructed.

0:17:59 Thomas: Okay, okay. Hmm. Yeah, This is really interesting. It's not necessarily what I would have expected. It sounds very, like you said, really loosely defined. It's kind of just a, it's, it's, it's just a label that some thinkers and artists were put under, but it just involves Like Deconstructing the current norms in some ways, hmm.

0:18:43 Aaron: It's a Yeah, exactly. It's just about deconstruction, modern postmodernism Is just, and so that's why they were worried about nihilism. For example, if you get really deep into deconstruction and you don't have a way back out towards a sophisticated form of realism or something, or some form of, you know, reconstructing of morality and epistemology and that sort of thing, you can end up in a very nihilistic place.

0:18:50 Thomas: I See.

0:19:11 Aaron: And ironically, the people that love these guys on the like Reddit 4chan forums are a perfect example of postmodern nihilism. They have deconstructed all morality and all cultural consciousness down to, you know, memes and trolling And lulls. And that's all. And then like, I'm not even saying that's bad. Like, they're doing their own form of postmodernism, and maybe there's some value to some forms of like, why, why can't we use this word, why can't I do this, you know, that kind of stuff, that's postmodernist critique, and that's not useless material, but it's ironic because they've gotten super nihilistic about it and Yet at the same time, these nihilists are crying out at the way that that mostly men are being treated by gender studies and academia, um, and The loss of male supremacy within Western culture.

0:19:28 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:20:00 Thomas: But I see what you're saying about, like, if the, if it goes too far, if you go too far into the depths of, there's no correct answer to any moral questions, or so, for example, like that, that maybe could be an example of too far in denialism. And you, I suppose, you know, we've taught, we had a discussion on morality. You know, you, We, we seem to have different but somewhat related ways of, of keeping some sort of moral constraints and, uh, real answers to moral questions in in our worldviews.

0:20:24 Aaron: Yeah, And I think that there are ways that, you, what I wish is that these luminaries in our fields were teaching ways to regain realism that didn't involve going back to the classical materialist kind of, that's another thing that's attached to the modernism that the postmodernists were pushing back on. Modernism solved the problem of woo by going really deep into the materialistic reductionist territory, and postmodernism pulled that back and started doing some, some non-materialist, you know, like psychology, a lot of modern psychology arises in response to some of the problems in that kind of way of thinking, and as we move towards like systems that aren't dualistic, that's a kind of postmodern way of thinking in a lot of ways.

0:21:22 Aaron: And these guys want to go back to an old way of doing things to try to preserve, you know, certain moral truths and certain realist truths, but I think there are better ways that we can go forward that would, that would not lead back to, like, sexism.

0:21:35 Thomas: Interesting.

0:21:35 Aaron: For example, because they're okay, they're okay with going back to a system that is passively sexist and passively racist because they don't want to do the deconstructive work that goes into weeding out passive sexism and passive racism, which is what gender studies is all about. Said, that's how I read it, and there are other, I'm sorry, there's one other critique that I want to give them credit for, but only so much credit. The obscurantism problem that they've brought up, because you're deep into that deconstructivist territory where you can go, sort of, nothing is true, everything is permitted kind of nonsense, sense, um, it makes it harder to call out, uh, obscurantist language that doesn't have any meaning To it.

And so, you know, all systems of thought risk obscuritism, everyone, you know, dogma can fall into obscuratism, uh, religion can fall onto obscurantism, but, uh, post-modernism certainly has a problem that it faces here. And but that's not specific to gender studies. And And it's not a new critique. That was the original critique of the original Sokal hoax was that sort of problem. And it is something that we can move past by getting to that kind of more sophisticated realism that I was talking about.

0:21:52 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:22:47 Thomas: Maybe I sort of can see the appeal then to some people, like, I feel like maybe, uh, these leaders who are kind of pushing this fight against postmodernism, they must think that that, like, we essentially more or less had it right once we got to modernism and like once we, that we went sort of a scientistic way, because there's... there's problems with scientism in the skeptic community as well, I think. And maybe that makes sense to why that's a good appeal to people who think science is the answer to everything. But I wonder if, so how do you make the link then? Because I think the biggest thing when it comes to Jordan B. Peterson and the fight against any sort of pronouns that aren't he, she, is he making that connection? Do you know, like, so is it that if we reject, is it more of that breakdown of the current norms? So other Z and Zer or something, thing. That's an assault on what somehow we already know is the correct genders or something. And then that is, is that what it is? Like the post-modernistic breakdown of that convention?

0:23:13 Aaron: Absolutely. Yep.

0:23:52 Aaron: Guess. I mean, like, if I'm being generous, right, if I try to give him a generous read, what I think is going on there is that, like I'm saying, they believe in a materialist kind of worldview. And so they believe in things like a more traditional account of sexuality and gender. And so when you start getting into this very fluid identity post deconstructed mindset where people can be whatever they want to be and identify however they want to be, that probably seems to them to be absurd in the way that, know, when Duchamp carried a urinal into a place and said that was art, people said that's absurd, right? So they might see it as at best performance art, but not a livable worldview. Or they're just lazy. I don't know.

0:24:35 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:24:42 Aaron: I mean, like, or they just don't care enough about learning that particular thing. Don't now. I don't know why people don't, why people care enough about it when it's that sort of thing. I spend a lot of time interacting with people who prefer to identify as they, but also correct me if I ever make a mistake. I've never seen it be a huge problem anywhere. I don't know where it's being a problem. I don't want to say that this is definitely not a problem. I'll be skeptical and admit that I have not been everywhere at once in the world. And maybe someone is calling somebody out for all of that, that pronoun stuff, and in problematic ways. But mostly, in my experience, people are very cool about the whole thing. So So I Have to reach for explanations like they're experiencing a loss of male dominated modernism by a multicultural post-modernism, and they're not happy about it, and I There was a quote, there was that I pulled from from the paper, from the hoax, that I think, like, I don't want to just, I'm not just putting words in their mouth here, so here's

0:25:20 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

0:25:43 Aaron: What that was Was Written in that article about the hoax. It said, particularly, we suspected that gender studies is crippled academically by an overriding, almost religious belief that maleness is the root of all evil. On the evidence, our suspicion was justified.

0:25:43 Thomas: Go ahead.

0:26:02 Thomas: That was the quote that I kept trying to point people to when it's like, no, No, no. He was pointing at two problems. Yeah. Okay.

0:26:11 Aaron: I mean, look, if he was pointing at the obscurantist problem, he would have written a postmodern article and published it in a mainstream science science journal, like Sokal did. If he wanted to attack, what was the other thing? If they wanted to attack pay-for-play, they would have attacked pay-for-play. They wanted to attack gender studies. And here's why I brought up the dialectic at the beginning. They wantedto attack it because they think that the liberal feminist worldview has become the new entrenched dogma. And so what they were doing is literally a postmodern critique of what they They see as the entrenched postmodern ideology now. Does that make sense? If they had succeeded, if they had succeed, they would have just been successful postmodernists, in my opinion. As it stood, they were sort of fair to Midland postmodernist because they they tried to prove three things when in a decent science experiment. I think you only try to prove one thing.

0:26:47 Thomas: Interesting. It's like post-postmodern.

0:27:04 Thomas: Right, right. And as Phil Torres pointed out pretty well, the two things they were trying to prove went against each other. They're mutually exclusive. So if one's true, the other's false. So they couldn't prove both at the same time. So that's kind of ridiculous. But anyway, but at the same time as all this, in to be fair, like you would acknowledge that Postmodernism certainly has its flaws, and like there's such a thing as postmodernist, postmodernism, just like modernism or just like realism or whatever the movement is, I guess, or the label, of going too far. And I suppose so, obscurantist kind of language would be one of those flaws, or maybe a breaking down of the scientific norms too much might could be one of those laws, is that. So how do we how do?

0:27:25 Aaron: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

0:27:55 Thomas: We sure go ahead.

0:27:54 Aaron: Can I read you another? When we talked about this before, you were curious about what sort of, I mean, if I had examples. I have an example for you from postmodernism, Husserl, who is pointed to as, you know, big in continental philosophy, but also maybe hugely obscurantist. Uh, I think Foucault or someone derived, they describe this as like obscurantist terrorism, basically, uh, So I picked this one because it's about sound and I thought that you as a sound guy would love this, so, um, try to follow this. Uh, sound is the change in the specific condition of segregation of the material parts and in the negation of the condition merely an abstract or an ideal ideality, as it were, of that specification. But this change, accordingly, is itself immediately the negation of the material-specific subsistence, which is, therefore, real ideality. Of specific gravity and cohesion, i.e. heat, the heating up of sounding bodies, just as the beaten or rubbed ones, is the appearance of heat originating conceptually together with sound. That was him describing how sound works.

0:28:04 Thomas: Oh, good. Good.

0:28:20 Thomas: Well, it doesn't sound like that insane. Like it's, it sounds like you could make those words like into what is actually happening in a way, but maybe that's just me.

0:29:15 Aaron: Sure. And, I mean, like, maybe you could. And part of the game is, you know, is there anything there? I, I, I think that if there's a legitimate critique here, it's that we are, we have successfully recognized the limits and flaws of Western modernism through post-modernism. We now need to to synthesize our skepticism, our post-modern skepticism, and our modernist realism into a functional, pragmatic worldview that allows us to believe things while constantly being critical of the things we believe. So,

0:29:51 Thomas: One place where I maybe I would, I'll be marching with Jordan B. Peterson is with, with regards to like post-modernistic art, you know, because I really, I mean, I don't pretend to know all of this, but when it comes to some of this abstract art that just looks like someone slopped some paint on a thing, I don't get it. How does that factor in?

0:30:00 Aaron: Think, You're right, no, I think your totally right. I mean, to the point where there were, there were, I don't know if they're apocryphal, but there are stories of very famous postmodern artists who would, like, put things into art exhibits just to see if anyone would try to call them on it, like, just To prove that, like, everyone was so cowed, and that, like, everyone was failing to be critical while claiming to be political, and that that was a problem within the community. Like, these are not old critiques of postmodernism, as I say, every, in the in the sort of cultural cyclical process, the new innovation becomes dogma, becomes calcified, and then has to be challenged again. So I think, hopefully, I don't, I'm not an artist, but one would hope, I agree with you completely, that that level of deconstructed post-modern art can get unapproachable and unenjoyable. And that a lot of artists hopefully today are using that kind of deconstructive stuff, but also pulling from older traditions again, to Come back to stuff that is a little bit more enjoyable and approachable to non-academic, non-artist types.

0:30:29 Thomas: Yeah, that sounds interesting, like sort of a fusion of kind of the best part. It sounds like This is, is it fair to say that it's almost, it doesn't seem like we should look, look at it so much in terms of, this was this phase, then this was this phase. It just seems like, let me ask you a hypothetical. If I'm out there and I'm an artist, or I were a philosopher, or whatever, and I am just doing my best to find the truest answers to questions I can, do I even need to have any regard for these labels whatsoever? It sounds, like there's no school school of thought that is postmodernism. It sounds like it's a name for a period during which a lot of the previous norms were rejected, but that sounds like every period, like all the time, a lot OF norms are rejected that were previously dogma. So it's, it just, it's

0:31:27 Aaron: Yeah.

0:31:57 Aaron: No. No. Good question.

0:32:11 Aaron: Yeah. Let me put It this way. I mean, I've been doing academic philosophy since I got to college, so 10, 15 years now, know, um, I had to go look up what technically qualifies as modern versus post-modern to help you with this discussion because like these these words don't come up in real academic philosophy, we don't care about this because they're not they're essential definitions we want we want no

0:32:16 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. They don't. So, so you don't start there and then go answer questions, right? So you don't start, yeah, okay, so it's it's a description of a sort of a loosely defined movement kind of it's not, yeah, right, yeah, well,

0:32:40 Aaron: No no, often by outsiders trying to lump together broad ideas that they don't fully understand, like post-modernism was a little bit more self-identifying than modernism was, but like this is like millennials, right? What does millennials mean? What does hipsters mean? Like, there are important concepts within here, concepts like, like deconstructionism is the key concept of post-modernism, I would say, but deconstruction is just a skeptical method applied to a variety of things. It's not a unique movement, it's just it's just a method, right? And in historical, in human history, it played out in the form of postmodern pop art or various other such things. But it's just the same thing you're doing on your show or we're doing in our show all the time where we're looking at the situation and saying, are we seeing this objectively or are we are seeing this through some sort of filtered lens that is missing some key information? That's postmodernism.

0:33:15 Thomas: Right, yes, So you could almost say that, like, you know what Einstein did to Newton is kind of a post-modernist. I mean, he completely changed our conception of, of the laws of physics, but you wouldn't call him postmodernist nonsense or something like, like there's some standard that he, hmm.

0:33:54 Aaron: Yeah, absolutely. But they did. Like, effectively, they did, right? When Newtonian physics was dominant and quantum physics came along, it was called nonsense. It was called, you know, incoherent and ridiculous and doesn't, you know, like, it doesn't—it was given the same similar sorts of critiques, and then as it started to yield predictable results, it took over, right, it took game

0:34:11 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, even, even Einstein couldn't really accept quantum physics. It's kind of interesting. After Einstein with relativity, you know, with general relativity overturned like the norms of his day, you know he couldn't bring bring himself to, to accept a lot of quantum physics. That's interesting. So, okay.

0:34:41 Aaron: Yeah. And that's why—oh, sorry, let me just throw something on there, because that's a good point. One of the reasons this dialectic always has to continue is that every generation, as it applies its new critique, is still limited by the time and place in which it exists. So much like Einstein can only stretch so far beyond his worldview, right? We can only scratch so far, so we can only do so far. So far beyond ours, we're still not getting everything right, and the next generation needs to come along and do another critique of us.

0:34:45 Thomas: Yeah.

0:35:10 Thomas: But how do we not delve into total relativism? Because you could, then someone could say, Hey, Aaron, if, if you think that, you know, everything we know right now is just up for grabs, like who knows, it could all be wrong tomorrow when the new smarter generation comes along or something or not, or, you know, a new generation just comes and has different norms and wants to overturn our truths. How do we, how do we keep from falling into a total, I guess, relativism?

0:35:34 Aaron: Yeah. Well, I mean, first of all, if I don't mind, I'll plug my episode of Embrace the Void, where we talked about moral realism specifically, and I gave a defense of moral realism. I do think that much like we can be essentially scientific realists, we can do a lot of things. Realists and we can know certain moral truths. We know that slavery is wrong. We don't think that another generation is going to come along and realize that slavery is actually correct, right, much like science has figured out certain numbers about things like gravity.

We might not know exactly how gravity works, but we can enough about it to give predictable results. Same thing with culture. We can build objective moral truths that are at minimum pragmatically functional and in my view actually real descriptions of the morality fabric of the universe, but, uh, you don't have to accept that sort of stuff to still be able to see that a kind of sophisticated moral constructivism based on your kind of consequentialist worldview would still be useful for society and something that's much better than, you know, you can't run society on 4chan is what I'm saying.

0:35:41 Thomas: Nice. Yeah. Yeah,

0:36:45 Aaron: Right. Nihilists.

0:36:45 Thomas: Or the Bible.

0:36:47 Aaron: Nihilist don't make good organizers.

0:36:49 Thomas: Yeah, but or the other way, like, or the Bible, or you know, like Rigid, yeah. Moral realism, like

0:36:49 Aaron: Yeah. Exactly. And in my opinion, you know, Peterson and them don't want to go back to the Bible's kind of rigid dogma, but they want to go to a kind of frigid dogma, and I think that's a mistake. They're afraid of the relative, they're worried of the deconstruction because it tends towards nihilism, but they think the only solution is to retrench back into a naive kind of scientific realism, where I think we, we can move towards a sophisticated postmodern realism that, you, the self doesn't exist, but morality is real, all the weird shit that I believe. I think there is a lot of, and there's a lot good philosophers making good arguments about that kind of stuff. So I think this is also a situation in which, I don't know what all of their backgrounds are necessarily, but I feel like they're not accurately engaging with the vast amount of work that is being done on the the problem that they claim no one has noticed.

0:36:55 Thomas: Yeah.

0:37:46 Thomas: Well, and, and to go back to what I was saying a minute ago, where all you have to do, I mean, you can just look for what, what you view as to your best ability, and I say you, I mean everybody, I guess, as an individual, can look at what they think the true answers to these questions are and do their best while realizing you can still question stuff. But in that case, though, maybe the response to Jordan B. Peterson's kind of word salad in his Fire and Brimstone speech about postmodernism is when it comes to gender pronouns, for example, now in light of what you're saying, the fact that postmodernism is not this cohesive philosophy that people rigidly attach themselves to. You could just say, well, no, I think the answer to the question of gender pronouns is some people don't like gender pronouns. Some people want to use their and they, and who cares? You can have that answer, and then you're not committed to some postmodernistic ideology that involves taking out capitalism and everybody wearing bedsheets as clothing and whatever his is, apocalyptic view of our society is.

0:38:00 Aaron: Yeah. Exactly.

0:38:55 Aaron: Here's how postmodernism deals with this, the problem of the gender pronouns. Ask the consequentialist question: does it do more good or more harm to let these people have whatever pronouns they want? Figure out the answer to that question, do the thing that produces less harm. We

0:39:06 Thomas: Yeah. What about the harm of Jordan B. Peterson possibly having to remember something like that? Because that's, I mean, stick that on the scales.

0:39:12 Aaron: Right.

0:39:22 Aaron: And this is, this is where this touches, you, you know, touches tips with, uh, with Andrew's accounts of why this, all of that stuff is going to get thrown out of court, is that the minute that it becomes substantially harmful to somebody, it's no longer going to be considered an acceptable idea. Just like I just said, just like the postmodernist, the only difference is that The Postmodernist wants to first ask the question, does forcing everyone to either be male or female cause more harm? And the answer is yes, it causes a lot more harm.

0:39:37 Thomas: Right. Yeah.

0:39:50 Aaron: So stop doing it. That's what they're mad about. They're not mad about the pronouns, they're mad about the fact that we asked the question if the worldview of 20 years ago is more harmful than the worldview right now. And it is. We know it is, we know that things have gotten better because we let people be who they want to be. And that's not something to make fun of with a hoax, that's something to embrace, and that's ridiculous. And, that's why I sometimes edge into emotional when I deal with these people, because I am a man, and I am very emotional, um,

0:39:50 Thomas: Yeah.

0:40:14 Thomas: Me too, uh, so, yeah. Well, that, that, I mean, that makes a lot of sense. I, I think I understand it better now. Is there anything else you want to make sure we covered?

0:40:29 Aaron: No, we all owe postmodernism a giant debt of gratitude, just like we owe modernism a joint debt of gratitude, and we should work to incorporate all of that stuff and what comes next. And and the people who say otherwise, or, I don't know, I don't know what they're what they' re going after

0:40:43 Thomas: But In the meanwhile in the meanwhile just like you put it best, just be skeptics, I mean, it sounds like a lot of this is just being skeptics uh, being willing to question almost anything, but at the same time, I'm not going so far as to dip into nihilism and that there's no truths that at all we can latch on to. You know, it sounds like that's the challenge, but still, what they're talking about in terms of deconstruction and all that sounds a whole lot like just being a good skeptic.

0:40:44 Aaron: Yep. Yeah. Be skeptics stay skeptical Yep.

0:41:11 Aaron: I completely agree. A good skeptic forces you to question all the things you believe, and that can be scary. But there are ways to do that and then not collapse into nihilism. And these guys know it. And this is an example of axe grinding in regard to, I think, females. And that's the more reasonable explanation, that these people have suddenly realized that skepticism is bad with regard to gender issues in society. Because I think we know that's not true. Skepticism is important with regard to gender issues in society. There are parts of their critique that are legitimate, and there are parts of their critique that aren't, and overall this looks like axe grinding to me, more than focusing in on the legitimate parts of the critique. So But now we all understand, that now we don't understand what postmodernism is, and we can, we can distinguish between good forms of postmodernism and bad forms of postmodernist. My

0:41:51 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. Well, Aaron, thanks as always for coming and laying a little philosophy on us.

0:42:05 Aaron: Pleasure.

0:42:06 Thomas: And of course, if anyone wants to hear Aaron, you can just go over to Embrace the Void podcast, type that into some sort of machine, and I'm sure it will come up.

0:42:06 Aaron: Man.

0:42:15 Aaron: Right.

0:42:15 Thomas: Assuming postmodernist troublemakers haven't overturned the laws of computing. I don't know. It should still work. Yeah. All right. Thanks as always, Aaron. Good stuff.

0:42:23 Aaron: Hail Eris.

0:42:42 Thomas: Alright, well, that's it for today's show. Really interesting to put postmodernism in context. I think there's certainly valid criticism of postmodernism, as Aaron said, and I would agree that there is valid criticism, but I think that labeling the entire thing as kind of a garbage, nothing means anything, nonsense words kind of thing is not exactly accurate. It's kind of a caricature, so I'm glad that I'm more informed on the subject and can kind of continue on in engaging with this kind of criticism with more to go on. With that said, look forward to Thursday, I got a great interview with Ishmael Brown on appropriation, Bill Maher, lots of stuff, so it was really cool, can't wait to bring you that, again I'll give that early to patrons over on patreon.com/seriouspod, so make sure to go sign up and get some early content for you there. Alright, with that said, have a great day, have great week, see you Thursday. We'll see you next Thursday.