I would often revere the sophistication of many high-brow academics. It can be seductive to hear theories or ideas spoken so eloquently. And I would assume because of their high capacity for knowledge, that somehow that would translate to the higher faculties of wisdom and virtue. Not so.
I recently read Roger Scruton’s excellent book, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands, to get some perspective on my old romance with postmodern philosophers.
He covers many of the biggies here: Sartre, Foucault, Habermas, Lacan, Deleuze, Gramsci, Badiou, and Žižek. So what do most of these guys have in common? Besides a lot of linguistic cleverness and windbaggery, they tend to view life through the lens of Marx to varying degrees. Scruton distills their abstract theories on the assumption that: “first, that ‘capitalist’ society is founded on power and domination; second, that ‘capitalism’ means ‘commodification’, the reduction of people to things, and the fetishizing of things as agents.”
So while establishing the Biblical idea (in secular terms) that world is fallen, the postmodern intelligentsia took it upon themselves to redeem it. In the process, they were also able to uphold their own position as a leisure class from their academic edifices while feeling contempt for the everyday man that disagreed with them. As such, they believed they possessed some knowledge inaccessible to the rest of us.
Their commitment for the postmodern intelligentsia is always toward some Utopian ideal that is never based on Truth. For instance, Scruton mentions that according to Sartre, “Nothing actual can be ‘authentic’. The authentic defines itself in opposition to the Other – which means in opposition to the world that others have created and in which they are at home.” For him, commitment can never be for the “fragmented imperfection of the actual, but to the purified ‘totality’ of an abstract idea.”
The cranky psychiatrist Lacan, who gave us ideas around the mirror stage and big Other, ultimately reduced meaning to some algebraic machination. As such, “Lacan showed that it is not necessary to mean anything anyway. You can go on meaning nothing for page upon page, and as long as a few ‘mathemes’ [symbolic representations] are thrown in, and as long as you maintain a posture of inviolable certainty, secure in the revelation of which you are the sole proprietor, you will have done all that is required by way of making a contribution to the emerging ‘revolutionary consciousness’.” (Scruton). (As a side bar, I find this video of a student protesting a Lacan lecture amusing. Apparently, Lacan had to give such nonsense lip service, since he was partially responsible for creating such misguided behavior.)
Scruton also points to Habermas’s meta-dogma, where “you will seldom encounter a real dilemma, and actual institution, a record of some felt community of purpose.” Instead you are left with a “methodological sophistication that places it beyond any criticism from standpoints other than its own.”
Scruton elaborates that with all these postmodern theories:
“Occasional lip service is paid to a future state of ‘emancipation’, ‘equality’ or ‘social justice’. But those terms are seldom lifted out of the realm of abstractions, or subjected to serious examination. They are not, as a rule, used to describe an imagined social order that their advocates are prepared to justify. Instead they are given a purely negative application. They are used to condemn every mediating institution, every imperfect association, every flawed attempt that human beings might have made, to live together without violence and with due respect for law. It is as though the abstract ideal has been chosen precisely so that nothing actual could embody it.”And that’s the issue with anyone proposing a new order of things. It's easy to criticize things as they are; however, it's not so easy to know if any new order will undermine the things that actually do work now (especially when presented so abstractly, and purposely so).
This Utopian impulse itself is not new, and comes from a deeper yearning we all share. Scruton again,
“Clearly we are dealing with the religious need, a need planted deep in our ‘species being’. There is a longing for membership that no amount of rational thought, no proof of the absolute loneliness of humanity or of the unredeemed nature of our sufferings, can ever eradicate. And that longing is more easily recruited by the abstract god of equality than by any concrete form of social compromise.”But that longing will also never be fulfilled through the application of abstract ideas. As Scruton notes, that religious need is probably better best served by traditional religious institutions — a place where we can sort ourselves out from within than to look outwardly for some systemic resolution.
So again, why all this smart foolishness? It would seem we have a scarcity of common sense in some parts of the academy. In that, Truth would be better recognized by a sensibility of deeper understanding than the conclusions that are just drawn from clever abstractions. This would require a vision of wholeness, an integrated character, and experience that is rooted in the senses and refined by reason.
The issue is when reason alone, rooted in a fragile ego, is the source of one's ideas. As Chesterton once quipped, “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madmen is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”
Yes, indeed.