I was hosted by the Free Speech Club at the University of British Columbia in March, 2018. After a protester disrupted things early, Adrian Austin graciously introduced me and I presented “Postmodernism and the Verdict of History.” The lecture was followed by a 35-minute question period.
Sub-topics: Tough times for free speech * What postmodernism is * The Enlightenment Vision * Why skepticism and subjectivism? * Post-Marxist adversarialism * Has the Enlightenment failed or succeeded?
Related: Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.
Postmodernism seems to turn everything a third world hell where excellence, effort and intelligence mean nothing. Why do so many Western intellectuals and wealthy people embrace a system of thought that would negate the advantage they’ve built up honestly or dishonestly over the past 250 years?
Postmodernism holds that all cultures are equal and that Westerner’s asserted superiority over all the other cultures is the source of all evil in the world. It holds that all knowledge is ethnic, racial and gender based, with certain leftists having at various times asserted that reason is a male tool of oppression or a white tool of oppression, etc.
It all goes back to the left reaction to Western Europe’s Age of Enlightenment with the likes of Rousseau preaching that science is bad, that technology is bad, that civilization is corrupt and that innocence is to be found in primitive existence.
With the leftist mentality, our culture represent what Rousseau regards as evil and all other cultures, as in Third World culture, represents the good and innocent. Such cultures include Moslem culture that legitimizes and validates killing unbelievers and oppressing women.
Thus postmodernism has led adherents to reject all that’s responsible for the level of civilization Western culture has achieved in favor of the savage and barbaric.
Precisely as many as are required at any given time. This scales from head of pin to cosmos.