Explaining Postmodernism by Stephen Hicks

Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault by Stephen Hicks, Professor of Philosophy – recommended by Jordan Peterson – is free to read as a PDF and listen on audio at www.stephenhicks.org/explaining-postmodernism

Here are extracts from the Introduction about postmodern ‘Critical Legal Theory’ and the postmodern view of education.

Critical Legal Theory

The Critical Legal Theorists represent the race, class, and sex version of legal postmodernism. According to the Crits, legal constitutions and precedents are essentially indeterminate, and the so-called objectivity and neutrality of legal reasoning are frauds.

All decisions are inherently subjective and driven by preference and politics. The law is a weapon to be used in the social arena of subjective conflict, an arena driven by competing wills and the coercive assertion of one group’s interests over those of other groups.

In the West, for too long the law has been a cover for the assertion of white male interests. The only antidote to that poison is the equally forceful assertion of the subjective interests of historically oppressed groups.

Education

In education, postmodernism rejects the notion that the purpose of education is primarily to train a child’s cognitive capacity for reason in order to produce an adult capable of functioning independently in the world. That view of education is replaced with the view that education is to take an essentially indeterminate being and give it a social identity.

Education’s method of molding is linguistic, and so the language to be used is that which will create a human being sensitive to its racial, sexual, and class identity.

Our current social context, however, is characterized by oppression that benefits whites, males, and the rich at the expense of everyone else. That oppression in turn leads to an educational system that reflects only or primarily the interests of those in positions of power. To counteract that bias, educational practice must be recast totally.

Postmodern education should emphasize works not in the canon; it should focus on the achievements of non-whites, females, and the poor; it should highlight the historical crimes of whites, males, and the rich; and it should teach students that science’s method has no better claim to yielding truth than any other method and, accordingly, that students should be equally receptive to alternative ways of knowing.

Contradictions at the heart of postmodernism

There is *no* narrative but there *is* a postmodern narrative

Across the board, we hear, on the one hand, abstract themes of relativism and egalitarianism. Those themes come in both epistemological and ethical forms. Objectivity is a myth; there is no Truth, no Right Way to read nature or a text. All interpretations are equally valid. Values are socially subjective products. Culturally, therefore, no group’s values have special standing. All ways of life from Afghani to Zulu are legitimate.

Tolerance to all ... but intolerance to those who disagree

Coexisting with these relativistic and egalitarian themes, we hear, on the other hand, deep chords of cynicism. Principles of civility and procedural justice simply serve as masks for hypocrisy and oppression born of asymmetrical power relations, masks that must be ripped off by crude verbal and physical weapons: ad hominem argument, in-your-face shock tactics, and equally cynical power plays. Disagreements are met - not with argument, the benefit of the doubt, and the expectation that reason can prevail - but with assertion, animosity, and a willingness to resort to force.