Helen Pluckrose

"Postmodernism and right-wing currents: Sawing off the branch on which you are sitting

Postmodernism liquidates the Enlightenment. And the left, with its relativism, subjectivism, identity politics and political agitation, facilitates the rise of right-wing currents significantly.

(Photo caption: Hoaxers who, with their “Grievance Studies” uncovered a serious problem: Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay (left) and Peter Boghossian)

Helen Pluckrose is worried. Among other things about left-wing, postmodern tendencies that want to mention concepts like “truth”, “objectivity”, “morals”, and “science” only ever in scare quotes.

David Detmer, Pluckrose relates, once asked a postmodernist philosopher whether “giraffes are actually larger than ants.”He received the curious answer that this was “not a fact but rather a dogma of our culture.” This is the postmodernism that left-wing intellectual Helen Pluckrose drags in her essay “Wie der Postmodernismus die Aufklärung abwickelt” (Comment: This translates as “How postmodernism liquidates the enlightenment.” I can't find an article of yours that has a closely resembling title. I suppose he means your essay “How French 'Intellectuals' ruined the West”, which may have been translated to German somewhere and given that title, but I don't know.) Postmodernist approaches aren't just largely nonsensical, they facilitate the rise of right-wing currents with relativism, subjectivism and identity politics.

Science Wars

Postmodernist currents could maybe be summarized as attacks on, and questioning of, science, objectivity and reason. Science, then, is a question of power and politics, the claim of objectivity completely baseless. The result is relativism in regards to culture, reason, political authority and norms. In place of a “totalizing and repressive” Enlightenment must step a revolutionary identity politics of ethnically, culturally and sexually marginalized groups.

Pluckrose regards many areas of the European and North American Humanities (Kultur- und Geisteswissenschaften don't really have an exact translation but this is probably the closest approximation) as infected by this postmodernist and relativist way of thinking, in particular, cultural anthropology and gender studies. Together with James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian, she took part in a hoax (known as “the grievance studies affair”). The three of them submitted papers to journals of the social sciences and the humanities in which politically correct positions of identity politics were argued for in postmodernist jargon. Accepted, among others, was an essay with the fabulous title “An Ethnography of Brestaurant Masculinity: Themes of Objectification, Male Control, Sexual Conquest and Masculine Toughness in a Sexually Objectifying Restaurant.”

Right-wing “identity politics”

When the struggle for objectivity, truth and reasoned justification is abandoned, they are replaced by subjectivism, personal sensitivities and eye-catching slogans. The phrase “I feel offended” may be regarded as a symptom of this. It renounces justification, relation to objective reality and grappling with other points of view.

These attitudes help the new right. The English journalist and author Kenan Malik remarked in this context, “that parts of intellectuals and the left helped to create a culture in which relativist approaches to facts and knowledge don't seem troubling.” In accordance with postmodernism, for example, the founder of the Nouvelle Droite in France interprets human rights polemically as inventions of Christianity and the European Enlightenment that is to be overcome ("Au-delà des droits de l'homme", 2004). This is a very deft reception of the postmodern relativism in epistemology, law and morals, to exploit it for one's own agenda: another “identity politics”, but this time right-wing and nationalist. Pluckrose fears, “the divisive and moralistic of the left, as well as their internal discord, let even the extreme right seem coherent and unified in comparison.” (Excuse me for translating this rather awkwardly translated quote back at you. I don't know the original)

Division in Society

A symptom of this relativist Zeitgeist is the vague talk of “values.” But even the Jihadis of “Islamic State” and other criminal organisations have “values.” Even pointing to “democratic values” doesn't help much. Many governments that can be classified as illiberal or authoritarian came to power through elections – or extended their power through them. The result is a further division of society. Pluckrose notices an attitude at universities in which it is no longer about the search for truth or secure knowledge but political agitation. Fans of postmodernist approaches, she notes, “increasingly act like bullies who force their world view on students and peers from other disciplines.” In the meantime ,the Alternative für Deutschland demands the abolition of gender studies.

Not all of today's problems can be ascribed to postmodernism or “left-wing thinking.” But, Pluckrose states, “we as the left should be worried what 'our side' has brought forth.” A Zeitgeist – or rather a malevolent spirit that we can't seem to get rid of anymore. Pluckrose is right, even if her criticism of postmodernism isn't very nuanced. It is gratifying to see that she, as a left wing intellectual, has the courage to criticize her own side. Others are politely invited to follow her example."

Georg Cavallar is Dean and lecturer at the University of Vienna, is currently working on an introduction to philosophy. His books "Islam, Enlightenment and Modernity" as well as "Failed Enlightenment - A Philosophical Essay" have both been published by Kohlhammer.