Welcome to the Future: A Postmodernist World
As a Year 12 Philosophy student, I thought postmodernism was more or less garbage.
One of those fancy trends that would eventually fade away from existence. However, 2016 and 2017 saw postmodernism go mainstream.
Postmodernism is philosophical way of thinking developed during much of the 20th Century, and philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard were instrumental in its’ development. Essentially, It has one core principle: “There are no absolute truths”. Which is strange, because that in itself is an absolute truth.
Postmodernism states that there is no one absolute truth, but many different interpretations of the truth. Which is why the headline of my article says “Welcome to the Future”, I have interpreted myself as living in the future, not the present. Postmodernism says I can.
Kellyanne Conway, a senior advisor to Donald Trump, has coined the term “alternative facts” following White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s claim more people attended Trump’s inauguration that his predecessor Barack Obama’s in 2009. Conway stated “We feel compelled to go out and clear the air and put alternative facts out there.”
The images are quite clear. More people attended Obama’s inauguration. That’s a fact. But postmodernism allows people to interpret the information differently. “Alternative facts” are an absurd idea, but not if you think in a postmodernist way. Conway, Trump, Spicer et all have a valid argument under postmodernism.
Postmodernism is however a doubled edged sword. Whilst you can use it to more or less spout nonsense, people can interpret things against you, too.
Take the recent ban on travel to the United States for citizens of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. An absolutist claim to make would be “blanket travel bans based on nationality are wrong”. Yet, all the countries on the list have a blanket ban against citizens of the State of Israel. The list of countries covered by Mr. Trump’s ban also includes Libya, which in the past has banned Palestinians, Syrians and Sudanese from entering the country.
There is no difference between these blanket bans and Trump’s recent one. No matter what your opinion is on the regimes in these countries, the people shouldn’t be punished. But the reaction to these prior bans was nowhere near the levels of anger at Trump’s Executive Order.
It doesn’t have to be. Postmodernism rejects absolute truths, so the statement “blanket travel bans based on nationality are wrong” is not valid.
Conway was still at it, she made up a massacre in Bowling Green to justify the policy. Another “alternative fact” that is not true, and could be quite dangerous in provoking anti-Muslim sentiment.
The decay of absolute rules is worrying. It means people could easily get away with things, others wouldn’t. It means people like Conway could basically lie and present it as “alternative fact” and trick the masses.
When one person does something, it is interpreted one way, and when another does it it is interpreted in another way.
People are for free speech, but only if the speaker is someone they agree with. The Sun, The Daily Mail and The Daily Express have been banned from campuses at City, University of London, Queen Mary and Plymouth universities. Yet, I have doubts that a more liberal, left-wing newspaper such as The Guardian or i would be banned.
A postmodernist world is terrifying. If people have different interpretations of the truth, then politicians can lie and gain power based on events and situations that never occurred, which would make a mockery of our democracy. Trump’s team has openly boasted about “alternative facts”.
But it’s not just the right who behave in this way. The left do it as well. They use postmodernist thinking to attack people they disagree with based on spectrum leanings. The end result is this divides a wedge between people who have polarising views. Politics should be about compromise, about people coming together to reach a conclusion, that is acceptable to as many people as possible.
An atmosphere has been created both in the US and to a large extent, Britain following the historic vote to exit the European Union, where this is impossible. Both sides look on the other with disdain. Despising everything they stand for, which can cause swings towards the more extreme sides of the political spectrum. Which in turn makes things worse, a fairly left wing person won’t be happy with a hard right elected politicians, nor vice-versa. It is a vicious cycle, created by postmodernist thinking. Using “alternative facts” and extreme relativist reasoning to label people and divide them by those lines.
I began my article by saying postmodernism was garbage. I’ll explain why. Imagine a pilot seeing signals in his cockpit. They tell him one thing, but he’s a postmodernist, he rejects absolute truths, so he interprets the signals in his own way. If this happens, he crashes the plane. Postmodernism can never work in reality without horrendous consequences, and we are seeing the beginnings of a postmodernist world.