I cannot understand Post-modernism. Two of the greatest modern intellectuals,
Noam Chomsky and Daniel Dennett, have admitted they do not understand it. What they really mean, of course, is that PM
is bullshit.
In fact, we know PM is bullshit. In 1992, the physicist Alan Sokal hoaxed “Social Text”, then and now one of the pre-eminent journals of PM. And in 2017, Peter Boghossian, James A. Lindsay, and Helen
Pluckrose successfully perpetrated a more elaborate hoax along the same lines. In both cases, Alan Sokal and Boghossian et al,
intentionally wrote obvious bullshit and tried to get it published in reputable, post-modernist, journals. They succeeded.
Clearly, every post-modernist, from Michel Foucault to
Women’s Studies professors at your local community college, is talking
shit.
Now, this is very odd: people hear this bullshit and believe it or, at the very least, defer to it. Why? I
think we are programmed to believe that if we cannot understand a person, it
must mean he knows something we do not know, and we are at a terrible disadvantage.
From the moment we are born we are surrounded by adults who
nurture us and protect us from a large and frightening world. And we cannot understand what they say. Eventually we come to understand, of course,
but it takes a long time. By the time we
are eighteen years old, we have spent a life time believing that people we
cannot understand know important things.
As students we extend this experience. From the time we are in fourth grade trying
to work out fractions to college trying to calculate a line integral, we
struggle to understand our teachers. Or,
maybe it’s physics or micro-economics or problems in metaphysics, we spend much
of our lives listening to people we respect but often cannot understand.
Finally, even in adulthood, we depend on specialists whose
language is almost impenetrable to us.
Doctors, lawyers, accounts, we hear them using English words but the
sense of it is often quite beyond our grasp.
World-wide, there is a long tradition of learning other
languages in order to study. The Romans
had to learn Greek. The Europeans had to
learn Latin and Greek, later French and German.
The Japanese had to learn Chinese, a language as difficult
for them as it is for us. Turks and
Persians had to learn Arabic. Today,
everybody learns English even if their mother tongue is Tagalog or Khoisan (the
African “click” language). Always, there
is a language barrier to knowledge. We are used to respecting people we cannot understand.
In a different domain of human knowledge, several religions are known for “speaking in tongues”, a
tradition that goes back at least as far as the classical world of Greece and
Rome. Again, someone you cannot
understand is presumed to convey a message of special importance.
A whole lot of people, for a very long time, have believed,
for one reason or another, that special knowledge requires a special language,
often difficult or impossible to understand.
This expectation is so old and so widespread, it is bred in our bones. That is why I believe when Jacques Derrida
and all his post-modernist friends talk shit, our first reaction is not to
laugh in their faces. Instead, we harbor
a deep and abiding suspicion they know something we do not, and it is
important.
So, that is why we let them get away with bullshit. But, why do they do it?
The writer, Isaac Beshevis Singer, once wrote than whenever
he cannot understand a person’s behavior, he assumes some kind of sexual
perversity is the reason. Along this line, here is professor Gad Saad in conversation with professor Daniel Dennett, speculating that Derrida and the post-modernists
invented their gibberish to get laid. They start discussing PM around minute 15:00 and
Saad starts speculating about their true, sexual, motivation shortly after
minute 24:00.
The desire to get laid may or may not be the real reason the post-modernists talk shit, but it is always my own go-to assumption when nothing else makes sense. And post-modernism does not make sense.
