Sargon of Akkad discussion: Pomo and Destabilization Strategies [transcript]

The transcript of my discussion with Sargon of Akkad follows the embedded video.

 

 

Understanding Postmodernism with Professor Stephen Hicks

Transcript of Sargon of Akkad’s (a.k.a. Carl Benjamin) interview with Stephen Hicks, June 2018

Questions

What inspired you to write a book explaining postmodernism?

Military history suggests that pomo is an attack strategy—is it?

Pomo is brilliant but diabolical, but why is it the far Left that’s using it most?

But pomo is not really communist, is it?

The manifest failures of socialism and the accomplishments of liberal capitalism—how did intelligent socialists respond?

Rhetorical strategies when truth and justice don’t matter?

Language is the prison of thought—is that key to postmodernism?

If everything is deconstructed, why does anything matter, including the evils of racism and sexism?

If values are subjective, why criticize others’ values?

Western culture’s points of sensitivity—freedom, dignity, equality—attack precisely those?

“Machiavelli”?

Sheth’s Towards a Political Philosophy of Race and Islamic theocracy: relativism and asymmetrical attacks on liberalism?

Is it illiberal to impose liberal values?

Why do some Western hyphenated-feminists ignore oppression of women in other parts of the world?

The unholy alliance of some western feminists and theocratic mullahs—common victim status?

Why do we see postmodernism manifested in so many fields—art, music, architecture, and so on?

Art and postmodernism and our different reactions?

Values, narratives, and metanarratives—attacking values?

The example of Muhammad and his child-bride?

“Civilization” versus “culture.”

Personal self-worth and identity—destabilizing psychological attacks on them.

How do we do best to fight back against postmodernism?

Interview

Sargon: I’m having a conversation with Professor Stephen Hicks from Rockford University, who is the author of the book Explaining Postmodernism that I have now read twice in preparation for this interview. Professor, how are you doing?

Hicks: I’m doing very well. Thanks for having me on.

Sargon: An absolute pleasure. Before we get into the meat of it, what inspired you to write a book called Explaining Postmodernism?

Hicks: Well, it needed explaining. It’s a very broad, sprawling, bewildering, infuriating movement both intellectually and culturally. And that struck me back in the 1990s. It was the first decade after I’d finished my graduate school and I was reading around in literature noticing trends. In graduate school you specialize and it’s like you have the blinders on while you’re doing your dissertation and research. So I was looking around at the broader intellectual world, and postmodernism was a thing. And it struck me that lots of the commentary on it was apt and perceptive, but typically focusing on elements of it. I did not see a synthesis of what made all of these apparently very disparate trends and movements in wide variety of fields all postmodern.

And the more interesting question to me was where it came from. How did it suddenly seemingly spring out of nowhere? And of course we know intellectual and cultural movements don’t just spring out of nowhere. A lot of groundwork needs to be laid, and given my training, it struck me both out of personally interest and professional training that I was well positioned to put the pieces together.

Sargon: I’m glad that someone’s done it, to be honest. Because like you say, it’s a very broad movement. It’s also remarkably deep as well, though. I’ve been reading around the subject an awful lot recently and I’ve got a sort of a longstanding interest in military history, and as soon as I started reading into postmodernism, I was very struck by how much of a tactic it appeared to be. Rather than a purpose in and of itself. It seems to be a method of getting to a destination, but didn’t have anything that I would consider to be just a base in any kind of value system.

Hicks: Right.

Sargon: Can you tell me more about that?

Hicks: Well, I think that’s perceptive. Obviously it’s an intellectual movement and the people who are in it are Ph.D.s. They’re trained in literary criticism and philosophy and associated disciplines. But what you do often get is the sense that it’s not about truth; it’s not about inquiry or an even-handed discussion of what the arguments for and against would be. You also don’t find that when we are having the arguments or discussions—you know, even though among intellectuals, we always have sharp arguments, and we can disagree passionately with each other—you don’t get the sense that the goal of the conversation is to achieve some sort of mutual understanding. Figuring out where I might have made mistakes, being willing to change my mind. Instead, the way I put it is that it seems to be a weaponized intellectual movement.

So what you have is rhetoric not being used for the purpose of convincing people of something that you think is true, but rather rhetoric used as a set of weapons—to put people on the defensive, throw them off guard, use words in explicitly deceptive fashions, and rather to overpower the person or undermine their power. So, the weaponized use of rhetoric I think is very characteristic of postmodernism. It can be analogized to a military tactic.

Sargon: Well, I couldn’t not see it that way, you know. It was just, it was stumbling the way it was almost kettling people with the language itself. A lot of people I hear say, “Oh, postmodernism is stupid,” and I say “No, it’s not, it’s brilliant. It’s genius.” I mean, there’s no getting around that some of the finest minds of the 20th century have worked on this, and they’ve come up with something that is diabolical, in my opinion. It’s really hard to explain to people that that’s true, and without them thinking that suddenly I personally, I’m also a postmodernist. Although, I mean, I can see that it could easily be applied to almost anything. I mean, why do you think it’s the far left that’s taken this skill set, this toolbox and applied to real life, rather than the far right or any other movement really?

Hicks: Yes. That’s a good pair of questions. On the first half of what you were saying: if you just take some concrete examples, you know, the very common use of insulting language, calling them a fascist? Calling someone a Nazi, or calling someone a racist or sexist, really at the drop of a hat. And we know of course that when we’re arguing sometimes we say insulting things out of frustration, right? We’re feeling attacked, we’re feeling threatened, and we just want to say something to vent, and so on. That explains some of the rhetoric.

But it does not explain the rhetoric of people who are intellectuals for a living. The give-and-take of argument and being able to take the heat that is part of their job, and so when they are regularly deploying this kind of language—everyone is a fascist, a Nazi, and so on—it can’t just be that they’re frustrated, and they are venting, right? This has to be explicitly a strategy.

And what of course they know is, from their study of rhetoric and their study of social psychology, is that certain kinds of language—when you direct them at people, particularly at decent people who are very sensitive about moral charges, and they’re very concerned with the truth, and so on—that it immediately puts them on the defensive. They feel a sense of personal attack, their emotions get up, and when people’s emotions get up, they do not argue very well. So, it is intentionally a destabilizing tactic when it’s used by sophisticated practitioners. It’s definitely weaponized.

Now, the morality of that is that if you are intentionally using tactics like that, you are confessing that you’re not that interested in civil discourse. You’re not interested in giving the person the benefit of the doubt that maybe they’ve just made some sort of error. You’re playing a different game, and we can talk about the morality of that later.

Now why the far left? Well, I don’t think that postmodernism as a general philosophical framework has to be the property of the far left. And one of the things that we are seeing, I think in the last ten years, is movements from other parts of the political spectrum starting to adopt postmodern strategies. We also see postmodernism being applied to areas outside of politics—in religion, and other places where issues are highly normatively charged. So, in one sense, this is a historical accident that it was first the left that adopted a postmodern framework and then applied it in various ways. And part of the thesis of my book is that there are good reasons why, given it history, the left out of a sense of desperation—and out of a sense of re strategizing—would find postmodernism agreeable.

So, the argument that I do make is that as we know in the modern world, the left has by and large been a failure. It’s been a failure intellectually. It’s been an outright humanitarian disaster everywhere that it has been tried. But nonetheless, there are any number of people in any generation who find leftism of various sorts highly appealing. If you find it highly appealing, but you are aware of the dismal history of left wing theory and practice, then if you’re going to be strategic in your maintaining your leftism you need something better than the old tried and failed methods of defeated leftism. And postmodernism is one of those strategies.

Sargon: So let me jump straight to it then. This is why it’s not real communism, isn’t it?

Hicks: No. I think, in one sense, there are no more real communists. If you talk to people on the far Left, they might see communism as an aspirational ideal. Really it functions more, in their minds or in them psychologically, as a kind of a Platonic form, or an abstract understanding of Heaven on Earth. You don’t find anybody—at least I don’t anymore—though when was younger one did find people who actually believed the Communist revolution would happen, that we could achieve real existing socialism right here on Earth. Now it’s a failed ideal—they don’t think it’s realistic—but at the same time they are still, for various reasons, appalled by liberalism, appalled by capitalism, appalled by Western democratic-republicanism. Whatever you want to call it. And so all they are left with is a critical stance.

Emotionally and aspirationally, some sort of communistic socialism is the ideal, but they’re not putting forth plans to bring that about. Instead, they’re focused on their long-hated enemy and finding ways to attack it, critique it, lessen it, bring it down.

Sargon: And, I would ascribe that to the manifest failures of socialism, and Marx’s theory, socialism in practice, and I mean the demonstrable superiority of capitalism and liberalism.

Hicks: Absolutely.

Sargon: I mean, in your book you suggested that it was effectively a tactic by some very intelligent socialists. Could you tell me about that please?

Hicks: I think there are four major subspecies of postmodernism, and we get to those in the sixth chapter of my book. One of them is what I call a Machiavellian strategy. So, if you’re a Machiavellian—taking the cartoon version of Machiavelli—you don’t think that there is truth, goodness, justice, decency, right, and so forth, in the world. Instead, it’s about power and being willing to use any tactics, fair or foul. All’s fair in love and war, etc., to bring about whatever your desired goals are. And you don’t have any sort of meta-justification for the rightness of your goals. You just take your goals, your agenda, your interests as a given, and you’re trying to achieve them by whatever. So it ultimately becomes a form of power politics.

Now, put yourself in the position of an intelligent socialist in the 1950s and the 1960s, because I think that was the crux decade. Some of the indications there are the widespread recognition among Western leftists that the Soviet Union has been guilty of a huge genocide under Stalin. And however blinkered they are with respect to the economic data, they are also aware that the West is better off. The argument that they traditionally had made was that capitalism drives people into poverty and that the exploited workers are going to rise up. You can’t make that argument anymore in the 1950s, when all of the poor people in the West are buying televisions, and cars, and so forth. And everybody’s getting fat, and we’re starting to worry about being too well fed.

Sargon: That’s our modern disease now. It’s not hunger, is it?

Hicks: Yes, we have the fattest poor people in history, and that says something. And then you start to see the manifestations, right? There was an explicit shift from the old left to the New Left—with a total branding and a new strategy.

Also important symbolically is the Bad Godesberg program of the German Social Democrats. They’re probably the leading historical Socialist Party with roots tracing them back to Marx. And it was after 1956 or so, they announced in their program that they’re shifting away from “We’re going to criticize capitalism on the basis of that it’s inhumane because it doesn’t provide for people’s basic needs. ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’” The criticism was that capitalism does not satisfy people’s basic needs. They abandoned that explicitly and said, “We’re not going to be able to attack capitalism because obviously it is satisfying people’s basic needs very, very well.”

The new criticism is going to be equality. It’s not that capitalism doesn’t produce a huge amount of stuff, it’s just that it does not distribute it equally across various dimensions.

You also see around this time the splintering of the left, which had been a relatively unified movement around some kind of Marxism, or neo-Marxisms, into all kinds of splintered, hyphenated-leftist movements—gender socialism, and ethnic socialisms, racial socialisms, and environmental socialism, and so on. And so socialism then comes to be defined in terms of all of these hyphenated adjectives. Two generations later, that’s identity politics, which is where we are right now—where your identity is a whole concatenation of hyphens.

Sargon: Disturbingly prescriptive as well.

Hicks: Well, there is the prescriptive element tacked onto that, so it’s both. So the left was in disarray in the 1950s and the early 1960s. At that point, since the left was feeling beat up on historically, intellectually, both theoretically and in practice, and it needed a new strategy. Postmodernism is one of those strategies, and it’s a rhetorical strategy.

Why are the intellectuals the ones who are doing this? It’s because of the intellectuals are the ones who are the most well read in the history and literature and they’re the ones who were most politically active. They are the ones with the PhD degrees, at the cutting edge of their discipline, so they are able to deploy the latest and greatest things coming out—of philosophy, particularly—to come up with a new strategy.

Now, to call it a Machiavellian strategy is to say, “Look, you can say that you are interested in equality, and fairness, and looking after the dispossessed and the oppressed, and so forth.” And there’s a long, well-traveled road by politicians who will profess that that is their end. Those politicians will say, “If you give us power or if you give me power, I will give you what you want.” They do not have to be sincere in that goal. Instead, the goal can be to get the power, but given whatever political landscape you’re operating in, how do you get a power base? One way is by appealing to groups who might have grievances, and if you can get them on your side then they give you power.

At the same time, there are any number of philosophical tools coming out of literary criticism and academic epistemology that are very effective. We can talk more about the epistemological elements here, but they are very effective at putting your intellectual or ideological enemies on the defensive.

For example, you and I are having an argument about something, and you’re a really smart guy, and you’re really convinced of your position, but I just keep throwing these facts at you, and I keep throwing this data at you, and I give you this argument. And you find yourself, “Wow. Man, I didn’t know that fact or I didn’t know that argument. I don’t know what to say to this.” And then you find yourself saying, “Well, you know, it’s just semantics, right? It’s all just a matter of opinion.” But what you’re trying to do in that case is deflect the necessity of dealing with the facts.

Because if it was just a matter of opinion or it’s all just semantics, then it doesn’t really matter—

Sargon: When you’re deliberately shifting the frame of the conversation.

Hicks: Yes, exactly.

Sargon: You’d already consented to a specific argument, and a boundary within which we’re debating. And then you say, “Well, it’s all just opinion.” That’s you effectively conceding the argument, isn’t it?

Hicks: That’s right. Okay. So then the other person has to then come up with an epistemological argument, and say, “No, not everything is a matter of opinion.” And that’s a very hard project. How do you make an argument that there are, in fact, objective truths and facts of reality? And if you cannot instantly, right on the spot, come up with an argument that adequately develops that, then the claim that everything is just opinion stands. And the other person doesn’t seem to have lost the debate. Of course if they do come up with a good argument—showing everything is not just opinions—you can shift it to semantics, or you can shift it to perceptual illusions, or definitional issues, and so on. The person then is disarmed and you’ve diverted the person’s attention from the original argument.

These are sneaky lawyer tricks, and one way of looking at postmodernism is—and this is the Machiavellian interpretation of postmodernism—is just like in a court of law: If you have a cynical view of the law, you say, “Well, there’s not really truth, there’s not really justice. What matters is we’re going into a court of law and it’s your side against my side, ad whoever has the best rhetorical strategy is going to win. We just need to deploy any tactics we think will be convincing to the jury or judge. If we can make up stuff and get away with it, if we can define terms differently, if we can draw the wool over people’s eyes in various ways, that’s fine. Because the goal is to win, not to get what’s true.”

So if you then apply that outside of the courtroom to politics in general, if you think the historical record has not been good to socialism—the goddamned capitalists seem to be doing better—then if I can come up with a new rhetorical strategy to give myself some breathing room, to put the bastards on the defense, I will go ahead and do so. And what had happened in academic epistemology in the early part of the 20th century was that some very sophisticated epistemological tools had been developed. And those are the ones that the postmodernists deployed with great success in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s.

Sargon: Before we go on, I just want to clarify for my audience. So, as I understand it, epistemology is the method by which knowledge is discovered, is that correct?

Hicks: Yes. It’s the criteria and standards for knowledge. How do we really know? We all have beliefs, ideas, opinions, and some things are hypothetical, and some things are factual while others are fantasy beliefs. How do we sort all of that? If we’re interested in knowledge, under what circumstances can I say I know something?

Sargon: Okay. So, this is leading me to exactly where I wanted to go with this.

Hicks: Good.

Sargon: Let’s talk about language, because this was one of the most fascinating parts of your book for me. The idea that if I’m remembering this correctly, or if I’ve understood this correctly. So, as I understand it, the postmodern sort of the strategy in this regard is to do with that conception of the way language is effectively a prison for human thoughts. And this is actually something that I’ve meandered about myself, just thinking, “Well that’s an interesting thing, isn’t it? If you don’t have language, can you think?” And I can’t remember exactly how you put it. Something like language always connects with language, never interfaces with what we would term reality, I suppose.

Hicks: Yes.

Sargon: And this is … it’s a very, very complicated idea, and I’m sure I’m doing it a grave injustice. But it’s very interesting how—

Hicks: You’re on the right track. Exactly.

Sargon: Oh, I’m really glad to hear that. But it’s very interesting how this becomes the avenue of attack. Can you elaborate more on that for me please?

Hicks: Well, the broad issue is the relationship between human consciousness and reality. The Holy Grail, so to speak, in philosophy. Because if philosophy is the quest for truth, but truth is some sort of mapping of what’s going on in my mind onto reality, or some sort of connection between the subjective and the objective, then articulating how we do that is critical.

Now, what the postmoderns do is buy into all of this skeptical arguments that had been developed by philosophers about every element of our cognitive processes. And they reach a negative conclusion—that there is no way to make a connection between the contents of our minds and reality. So we are trapped inside our heads, or we’re trapped inside of our minds. And since we are conceptual beings and we do use language, language then is not a tool of cognition. Language then is—you used the prison metaphor. It becomes a set of walls that we build around ourselves that block ourselves from having access to an external reality.

Now, how they get there, that’s a long set of stories. But a short way to do it is: If you look at your introduction to psychology textbook, where we study the functions of consciousness or the various modes of awareness. We have our senses. If we’re well and healthy we have five of those. If you’re a skeptic though, then you will take seriously the arguments that say our senses do not put us in direct contact with reality. So already we have an obstacle between our minds and reality. So that’s just our senses.

Memory is another cognitive function. But then you can develop your skeptical arguments about memory.

We form abstract concepts and use words, but a word is abstract. You’re a human being, I’m a human being, but you’re also a particular human being. You’re very different from me and I’m very different from others, but we all share this common humanity, as we call it. Well, what is this abstract “humanity” that we all share? And there are some philosophical puzzles about that. So, if you think that abstractions are subjective or not tied to objective reality, then you’re also going to say, “Well, even just the use of words is already a distancing-from-reality thing.”

But then we also take words and we put them into more complicated structures. We form sentences, we put them into stories, and narratives, and theories. And as you go on, there are of course puzzles and challenges there. So what we get, by the time we get to the early-to-middle part of 20^th-century, is that philosophy, particularly epistemology or cognitive studies, was in a very skeptical place. “We don’t see how the senses connect to reality, or memory, or abstract concepts, or narrative, or theories.” Or much less scientific method, which takes all of those capacities and puts them together in a very complicated and sophisticated ways. Most philosophers of science and most epistemologists were just throwing up their hands and saying, “I guess, everything is subjective. Everything is arbitrary.”

And the leading postmodernists—all of them got their Ph.D.s in the late 1940s, and early 1950s—all of them actually in philosophy. They’re well aware of all of these skeptical arguments, and that gives them some tools in their toolkit, to use your language.

Sargon: Well, it was just what came to mind. So, this is really interesting because as far as I can see, they’ve kind of painted themselves into a corner. So, I mean, we can’t be sure that anything around us is real. We don’t think science actually can yield results, and objective reality and even the very concept of truth are in doubt.

Hicks: Yes.

Sargon: So, what’s the value judgment that they can possibly make against something like racism or sexism? If everything has been deconstructed, nothing has any value anymore, and nothing means anything, who cares if someone’s being oppressed? Why do they care?

Hicks: That’s right. So if a postmodernist is not careful, then they are trapped in a contradiction, because on the one hand they do seem to be saying things like, “No, racism is evil and sexism is bad. Any sorts of inequalities are an affront to human dignity.” And they’re using highly charged normative concepts, but they’re deploying them objective universal truths about the human condition. But then you cannot at the same time deploy all of the skeptical epistemology that everything is just stories, it’s just narratives, it’s just people’s subjective value preferences, and there’s no right and wrong.

But there is a contradiction at work there, and there are any number of them. And the way that they are handled then is to say, “Well, look, when we are talking about the normative realm, we will grant to you that everything really is just subjective, and arbitrary. And that there is no way for anybody to think objectively outside of their own subjective and arbitrary framework.” But then they will just say, “Well, as a matter of fact …”—again I’m flirting with contradiction here—“… I happen to have been born with a certain constellation of value preferences formed in me. I was born to this gender, this race, this ethnicity, this that, and the other thing. Speaking a certain language that shaped my thinking, and there is no way for me to think outside of that framework, or realistically to adopt a different value framework.”

“But life is just individuals having their value framework and trying to assert it in the world. And of course people with different value frameworks are doing the exactly the same thing. So it really is just a power struggle among competing arbitrary value frameworks. And from my perspective, I want mine to win.”

Sargon: Well, that’s literally like the … that essentially as far down as I’ve drilled it, because once you get to this point, as far as I can see, there can be no arguments in favor of one value system or another.

Hicks: That’s right, and—

Sargon: So, now it is exactly the same. It’s just a power struggle, and if that’s the case, why would they approach me as if I would care about their moral condemnation or their character attacks, in the form of an insult or an accusation about racism or sexism or whatever? I mean, the very idea that this is something I should care about. I mean, unless they were doing this cynically, and they knew what they were doing, they wouldn’t even dream of approaching it, if they want to be consistent anyway.

Hicks: Right. The reason for that is that they know that you’re operating from a different philosophical framework. For them, power is the goal and the assertion of their subject interest is the goal. But if they know something about you, they know that you are a person who believes in facts, in reality, in objectivity, and that you believe that civil discussion and argument are the ways that we should resolve our differences. And they know that you are willing to be tolerant and cut people slack, and give them various benefits of the doubt. That os a set of attitudes and beliefs and practices that you have, but ones that can be used against you. If they can convince you that you need to be civil, and argue, and come up with all kinds of facts, that’s going to use up a lot of your resources. And to the extent that you’re not able to do so, you’re going to feel like a failure. So you’re going to be less effective at doing so. Meanwhile, they can just continue to move the goalposts, use various rhetorical tactics and be more successful in the competition.

Sargon: Yeah, continue to just assert and gain ground by doing that, while keeping everyone else on the defensive. It’s very interesting, and I suppose that explains the effectiveness of their rhetorical tools, doesn’t it?

Hicks: Sure.

Sargon: I mean, they’ve gone for the most sensitive things underlying modern Western culture. You know, accusing people of arbitrary bigotry of any kind is just … it’s such a condemnation. And this isn’t accidental obviously, is it?

Hicks: No, absolutely not. So, for the first time in human history, really, it was Western civilization, in the early modern world, that became sensitive to issues of race, class, gender, and so forth, authoritarianism, concerned with people’s dignity, rights, liberties, equalities, and so on. So this is now a very strong part of our cultural DNA, and we know that the vast majority of people are very sensitive to those issues. And so the postmoderns use exactly that sensitivity against the person. For many of them—the Machiavellian ones we’re talking about—that is a calculated strategy. The point of making various sorts of demands is often not that they actually expect people to grant those demands, it’s rather to put the other person on the defensive and see how much you can get away with.

Sargon: That’s really interesting, and I feel like I should defend Machiavelli. I feel like his name is being misused.

Hicks: Well, yes, I know. Yes, there is more republican Machiavelli.

Sargon: He wasn’t a bad guy. Honestly, I find this just such a huge topic. I’m not even sure where to start, where to go. So let’s talk about the relativistic nature of postmodernism. This is something I really find interesting, because I read, was it, Towards the Political Philosophy of Race by Falguni Sheth, and I was amazed by the perspective that she was taking. Because in a way it was almost like she was taking the eye of God when analyzing Western liberal civilization. And she was effectively trying to make a case for the racialization of Muslims in Western civilizations, because they have a different set of values, and these need to be normalized with Western values before they can be fully incorporated into the politic.

And that’s not untrue, but it was the way she was taking the position of the sovereign, the opinion of the sovereign and how it drills down. And from her perspective, and it’s not wrong, but it’s also not human the way she’s doing this. And it was just a power analysis, and so from the position of the sovereign, it really doesn’t matter to you if your subjects are like the Orcs or the Ells from Lord of the Rings, as long as they are your subjects and the state continues to function. But that’s just so far out of the realm of real people’s experiences. And until I read your book, I was amazed by the way that she could just equivocate between modern Western liberal democracies and Islamic theocratic patriarchies without ever criticizing the patriarchies.

She just did not have a single word to say about these. And she even went into long defenses of burqas and forced oppression of women, and things like this. I mean, why don’t they care? What’s wrong with them? Why do they just attack Western liberal democracy?

Hicks: I’m not familiar with this author or book, but you’re pointing to the general issue of relativism and its applications. On the one hand, it’s possible to do some philosophy—you think about issues and have a hard time justifying any sort of factual basis or objective basis for normative right to conclusions, so you reach the conclusion, “Well, I guess that normative judgments are relative.” They can be relative to us as individuals, in which case, you have yours and I have mine, and we’re never going to see eye to eye. What do we do about that? Or we can relativize it to social groups, to an environmental-determinist view where I happen to have been born into a certain culture, and so I’m conditioned to think and feel, and emote a certain way. And the same thing also holds for you, but if you come from different cultures, and so on.

Then I can’t say that my way of thinking, and feeling, and emoting is any better than yours. If you go down that road, then you should, logically-speaking, stay in a completely non-judgmental perspective. This might tie into what you were talking about—the absolute God’s eye view. That as an intellectual you scale out your perspective and say, “Well, there’s this group and they have their values, and there is this group and they have their values. And that’s just the way it is. And I don’t necessarily have God’s authority to put my thumb on the scale and say, this one is better than that one.”

Now, if you’re a hardcore relativist, you face in a fork in the road. One fork in the road is the one that is often taken by Western liberals who wants to say that, we are in this relativistic predicament. So what we should do is to say all groups’ normative standards are equally valuable. I as a Western liberal might be conditioned to think that peace, tolerance, and some sort of liberalism is the right kind of system. But there might very well be Islamic theocratic regimes that have all sorts of practices with respect to their women and children, and I can’t apply my Western liberal standards to judging them. I can only apply my standard in my social circle. So I should not be judgmental, and that means I need to have toleration for those sorts of practices.

And if I don’t do that—if I try to apply my Western liberal standards to Islamic theocracy—then I’m being morally imperialistic, right? I’m trying to force my stance on them, and we know imperialism doesn’t sit well with Western liberalism. So then you get a tolerationist perspective. Any number of Western liberals are in that category.

Now, then you have a problem because what happens if the other side is not abiding by that set of standards? Take Islamic theocrats. They are not playing the game of saying, “Oh, all cultures value standards are equally legitimate and we can’t impose ours on them.” So they’re not willing to play the toleration-and-live-and-let-live game. They are trying imperialistically to impose their standards on you. That of course puts the Western liberal in a dilemma.

We see that dilemma being played out all over Europe, for example, and we here in North America now. It becomes a totally disarming for the Western liberals: You literally do not know what to do because your philosophy does not give you any tools for dealing with this kind of a threat.

I’ll leave it at that for now, in case you want to jump in.

Sargon: I mean, it’s interesting you say that, because I’ve actually spoken to social justice advocates and these words have literally come up with my mouth, “Isn’t it illiberal to impose liberal values?” And I’m like, “Well, not really.” I don’t think it is. How could being liberal be illiberal? And the thing is, as soon as they get to this point, this is always at the end of a long conversation that I’m having with them. Where I’ve just got to the point where I say, “Look, I’m not prepared to accept the second class citizenship of women. You know, I’m not prepared to accept that.” And I think the force of law should be used against people who are trying to impose that. And then they’ll say to me, “Isn’t it illiberal to do that?” It’s like, No. I think that’s what a liberal should do. I think you should be like vocally objecting to these things rather than tolerate them.

Hicks: Absolutely right. Liberalism’s bottom line is that the liberty and dignity of each individual is a fundamental value. We believe and have arguments for saying that there are such things as objective facts, including objective moral facts, and the liberty and dignity of each individual is your basic fact. Then you are justified in using force in defending against those who violate that fundamental fact. As liberals, you give wide scope to other people to do whatever they want, but you draw the line at the fundamental violations of liberties of other individuals.

Sargon: Yes. It’s like John Stuart Mill’s Harm Principle, isn’t it?

Hicks: Well, the Harm Principle is a variation on that. Anyway, that’s a detail. There are other formulations that I prefer, but Mill is important.

Sargon: He’s just the one that jumps to my mind. But what ones do you prefer?

Hicks: Lockean and Jeffersonian, but that’s another set of issues speaking within the Western liberal tradition. And issues of defining harm, and then we get into some technical issues which are important here.

But there’s another part of what you were saying. It does seem that there is a double standard in the application of tolerance. So if you—and this is not original, this is pointed out all over the place—if you take, for example, the status of women. If you are a Western liberal woman, then you will use objective and absolutist language to argue that the second-class treatment of women is a moral abomination. And of course it is a moral abomination. Women should have full liberty rights with men, and we need to get rid of any double standards in the law, and reform various cultural practices, and so on. And all of that is a longstanding liberalism.

So it is a puzzle then when we come to second-, third-, fourth-generation feminisms, that they seem strategically to turn a blind eye to very objective, brutal oppressions of women in other parts of the world. You see being played out in their intellectual framework exactly the contradiction that we have been talking about.

In their heart-of-hearts, they say that obviously all of those treatments of women are wrong, objectively wrong, and we should be fired up and passionate and use all of our cultural and political tools to end that oppression. But at the same time, they do get themselves into intellectual pretzels trying to say, “Well, it’s different when that’s done by Islamic people to their own women or to their own children. And we can’t be imperialistic.” And so on. So yes, that’s a philosophical problem.

Sargon: It’s interesting you say that, because recently Iranian feminists have been complaining about Western feminists, because the Iranian feminist are currently trying to liberate themselves from the theocratic commandment that they have to wear a hijab. And Western feminists are backing up the mullahs, which is strange, isn’t it?

Hicks: Well, it’s worse than strange. It’s a moral abomination.

Sargon: Of course, yeah.

Hicks: That points to there being other things at work. And this is where you start entertaining the hypothesis that for many of the Western feminists of the whichever-set-of-adjectives-you-want-to-put-in-front of feminist—that the liberty and equality of women is not really their agenda. Maybe they bought into that when they were younger, but they have evolved into something else. If you are willing to tolerate the objective brutalization of millions of women around the world, then obviously women’s liberty, equality, and dignity are not your agenda. It’s something else.

Sargon: Yeah, it’s very interesting actually, the unholy alliance between feminism and Islam that’s been springing up everywhere. And I’ve been thinking of this a lot. I think that part of it comes from that they both share effectively the same moral paradigm, where—if they’re not hegemonic—they consider themselves to be the victims of whatever dominant moral philosophy is dominating society. And so they love to portray themselves as victims despite the fact that obviously, I mean, you know, no one else within the society would consider that the case.

Hicks: So that’s a point of commonality. To go back to your military-strategy point from earlier: The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Sargon: Yeah.

Hicks: So, then you would ask the question, “Who is the deepest and most powerful enemy of the mullahs?” And it’s going to be the same enemy as the current hyphenated-feminists.

Sargon: It’s the liberals, isn’t it?

Hicks: That’s right. It’s Western liberalism. It’s Western democratic capitalism, and so on. That’s the big enemy. So they’re willing to engage in a strategic alliance which defeats the common enemy, and then in the future they will take on the mullahs.

Sargon: Right. Yeah, I mean that’s the only way it could possibly be really. And it’s interesting how I’m absolutely certain that each group harbors sort of secret designs on the other. I think that they think they can subvert one another’s ideology, but I don’t want to get too deep into that rabbit hole.

Hicks: Yes.

Sargon: So coming back to postmodernism. Why is it that postmodernism manifests itself in so many different fields like architecture, arts, music, poetry? I mean, does this all spring from philosophy, or how does it get everywhere?

Hicks: Good. You stole my thunder.

Sargon: I’m sorry.

Hicks: This is a testament to the power of philosophy. That as smart, intelligent human beings we have to be philosophical. We think broadly, we think in terms of principles. And then when we adopt very broad principles and apply them to various aspects of our lives, we get the same sorts of results.

Human beings—when we’re thoughtful and passionate, we’re interested in all sorts of things. We’re interested in politics and religion and art and music and history and archeology and astronomy and the whole Shebang, right? But if we have a small set of unified principles by which we think and evaluate in all of these different areas, then we should have the same sorts of manifestation.

So, when postmodernism as a set of principles—as a philosophical way of looking at the world, that is skeptical, is anti-realistic, is jaded about human relationships, is suspicious and hostile toward the objectivity in the achievement of genuine values. If that is your philosophy and then you apply it to art, you’re going to get certain outcomes. If you apply it to politics, and if you apply it to whatever, you’ll get similar dynamics.

Sargon: This is very interesting. So, I for the longest time I couldn’t understand … So, postmodern art. I was just looking at it and thinking … I mean, so subconsciously I was thinking, you know, this has no value to me. But it’s only after reading your book, it’s like, well, of course it doesn’t, why should it? You know, what value does it have?

Hicks: That’s right. As we know art is a deeply intellectual, deeply emotional, and the works that we respond to most strongly are the ones that resonate with the most important elements of our psyche. So, it would make sense that if you are a deeply cynical, jaded person who thinks everything is shit, you want to express that—but people who believe in genuine values, positivity, and genuine connections between humans, they’re not going to connect at all. They will be the alienated in a fundamental way by that art.

Sargon: Right. This is such a broad topic. I’m not even sure how to address it really. Like, I guess the connection between values, narratives, and meta-narratives. Because as a layman I’m looking at this and thinking, “Okay. So obviously narratives, plural, make up meta-narratives, and from these stories we gain a set of values. And so the postmodernist attack on meta-narratives, to break them up, like atomizing them almost, it seems like a deliberate attack on the way that people form of value system.” Have I got that correct?

Hicks: Well, it can go the other way. If you start with the values, what many of the postmoderns will say is that the values come first, and so what narratives appeal to us are going to be the ones that already push our subjective value buttons.

Sargon: Right. Yeah. So, we’ll only tell the stories we want already.

Hicks: Yes, that’s right. Oh yeah, we’ll only hear those ones, and will only associate with people who share that set of values. Otherwise, we start telling stories to each other, but we’re using language in ways that is uncommunicable to people of different value frameworks.

Sargon: Yeah. That’s interesting, and an example of that would be the story of Mohammed’s wife Aisha, told several times in several different perspectives. The most interesting one, I mean the standard one that we hear from Sunni Muslims is that she was nine years old when Mohammed first copulated with her. Obviously making him quite reprehensible in the eyes of a modern person. But this is a very interesting conflict of values because apparently she might actually have been in her 20s, and the reason that the Sunni Muslims say, “Well, she was only nine years old,” is to make sure that she was a virgin. Because of Mohammed is marrying a 22-year old, it’s unlikely she’s a virgin in 7th century Arabia. I mean that seems to be like an extraordinary example in regards to—

Hicks: So you have a value commitment driving the narrative?

Sargon: Yes. Yes, exactly. That exactly.

Hicks: Sure.

Sargon: And so the meta-narratives themselves, they’re stories we build our civilizations on, aren’t they?

Hicks: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Sargon: How we know what we are, and why we are these things, and why these things are good. Isn’t it really immoral to attack that?

Hicks: Yes, I agree that it is.

Sargon: It seems evil.

Hicks: But that as a general value judgment against postmodernism, and I would absolutely share that. But at same time, I would have to say the postmodernists do travel a long philosophical road to get there.

One interesting way to put it as to say you are concerned with defending the foundational values of civilization. To put it crudely, postmodernists don’t believe in civilization—that there are only cultures. Because civilization is to say that there’s a certain complexity and a certain level of achievement that—

Sargon: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.

Hicks: —before we start our calling something a civilization. And postmoderns want to deflate that. All of the alleged civilizations are frauds, or they are just one other culture that has told a highly self-congratulatory narrative about itself. It is trying to put on airs and say, “Oh no, we really are a civilization,” but there are no such things.

Sargon: Again, that’s really interesting because I’m aware that a person’s self-confidence and self-worth comes from the things about themselves and their culture that they believe. So to attack that, and attacking identity in particular—I mean, all of this is an attack on identity really—but to attack these things seems like a form of psychological warfare. I mean, if you wanted to make someone afraid, isolated, insecure, and just malleable to outside forces, you would be attacking the value structure that they believe in, the civilization or the culture in which they live, and their own moral stance as an individual. Their own moral worth by calling them whatever name.

Hicks: Absolutely.

Sargon: I mean, it’s, again, a devilishly clever tactic.

Hicks: Yes. What you’re saying is perfectly well put. To be a human being, to live a good life, for our lives to be meaningful, we are self reflective beings so we are intelligent and sensitive. We put a lot of time into thinking about what our core beliefs are, shaping our characters, developing habits, committing ourselves to long-term projects that over time form my identity. This is what my life has amounted to. And we want it to be positive. We want it to be good, noble, beautiful, meaningful, significant, and all of that is very healthy. And rational philosophy should help each of us in this astoundingly important project as individuals. So, in that sense yes, postmodernism is a wicked attack on all of that, because what it wants to do is—at a philosophical level—to say that philosophy is of zero use to you in this project.

And then it does systematically go through anything about you that you think is of worth, dignity, that is your accomplishment—well, we’re going to deflate that. And the most we will give the credit to some other institution. Or, you have something about you that you think is noble, true and/or beautiful—we deflate it, we undermine it, and then particularly if we see you as part of a value group that we are opposed to with antithetical values. Yes. What we want to do is destabilize your sense that in any way you are a worthwhile, deserving person. And they’re very clever people at doing so. That’s exactly what’s going on.

Sargon: Yeah. Like I said, like I’m a big fan of military history, and I’m looking at this as if territory is being taken, and this is an Alexander. It’s unstoppable. I mean, and just like that—

Hicks: It’s your psychic territory yes.

Sargon: Yes. That’s exactly it. Okay. So what can we do about it? I mean, like if we agree that we’ve come to a place, I mean I don’t know that my senses are sensing reality. I have to take that on faith, and I’m an atheist, so I don’t take a lot of things on faith. What do we do?

Hicks: Well, you need better epistemology then, and that would be my fundamental point. Human beings are smart. We have a big brain. We have a very sophisticated conceptual apparatus working out how that actually works, and that it works effectively and successfully. That really is our most important philosophical project.

The success of postmodernism has been as a result of the failure of philosophers and cognitive scientists to develop articulate responses to that.

Now, things I think are a lot better in the last generation compared to where philosophy was and cognitive science was two generations ago. So we do have better answers to all of that. So the short, the quick-and-dirty answer to your question is to say we need better philosophy. Postmodernism is a result of skeptical, failed philosophy.

It’s now in its second, third or fourth generation, depending on how you slice and dice things, but it was the application and institutionalization of a set of philosophical failures that has led us to where we are.

By contrast, earlier in the interview you were pointing out in the modern world we do have all sorts of enormous achievements, increasing life expectancy. The material benefits that come out of—

Sargon: Across the board. Yeah.

Hicks: Yeah, that’s across the board. You know, the magnificent edifice of science, the physics, the astronomy, the chemistry, the biology, and so on. The astounding technologies that you and I across an ocean can have a conversation like this. And all these things that we know, all of that of course came out of a philosophy. Broadly speaking, Enlightenment philosophy of the 18th century. We still live largely in an Enlightenment philosophical culture—

Sargon: Just to be clear on this. This is what we called modernism, isn’t it?

Hicks: Well, I think modernism is a little broader. The Enlightenment’s use is a little narrower. We can get into that, but yes, broadly speaking, the modern world has an enormous number of successes, but those successes came from a philosophical set of revolutions in the early modern world.

The Enlightenment: I think of it as a capstone few generations when modernism matured, and then became not just an intellectual movement but also a social movement. And became institutionalized in various aspects of the culture. And that’s essentially what they mean: postmodernism is a reaction against that and its self-conscious forms an attempt to tear that down and destroy it.

So, what we do need is, I don’t like “return to”—I’m not fundamentally a conservative—but we do need to take the core insights of the Enlightenment and reaffirm those. Identify its weaknesses, and there are weaknesses—all of the ones that the postmodernists have exploited—and come up with better philosophy, better cognitive science, better understandings of normative issues, especially to rebuild and build upon what are legitimate foundational achievements of the Enlightenment. So that’s the philosophical project.

Not everyone is a philosopher, but I do think everyone does need to be philosophical at some level and be aware of what the issues are. Some of the battles, though, are institutional in whatever institutions we’re working in. Whether it’s a university, or a corporation, or even within our own small businesses, and our families, we need to have these discussions. We need to reaffirm kind of core, liberal, rational, civil values and fight for those in our workplaces against the corroding effects of postmodernism. We all have the ability to do that as well. It’s a multi-front battle.

Sargon: Okay. And on a sort of personal level, I’ve been … the best I can recommend to people is that they be self confident, and they take the time to ground themselves in who they are, what they believe, and don’t accept unfair attacks on their character obviously.

Hicks: Absolutely.

Sargon:Is there anything else that you would add to that?

Hicks: No, I think that’s very nicely put. Once you realize that the part of the postmodern activists’ strategy, the so called social-justice warriors, who are actually anti-social and anti-justice—and

Sargon: They’re certainly warriors though. You got to give them that.

Hicks: Yes, of a sort. Once you realize what the weapons are and what the tactics are—yes, having enough self-confidence to say “What I believe are importantly true values.” Now, of course, if you know you’ve not done the philosophical work to justify those, you might still be in a position to say, “No, I think these are important and decent values, and I’m committed to them, but maybe I’ve made a mistake along the way.” So you need to be open to the criticism.

But when you are faced with what you know are unfair attacks, people are calling you a racist, or a fascist, and so forth—don’t let that inside at all. In fact, turn that against the person, because one of the things we do know is that if you’re at all concerned with justice, unfair accusations of injustice are enormously destructive and counter productive. So, call people on it.

Words need to mean things: If we want really to be concerned with racism, you can’t be throwing racists accusations around casually. You really are concerned with sexism—then that can’t be a casual insult.

[Video of this interview at YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knOwcZ0y5IE).]