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The essay below is the tenth in a series by Takuan Seiyo. See the list at the bottom of this post for links to the previous installments.

^{Left: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette, 1876
Right: George Grosz, Metropolis, 1916/17}

The Bee and the Lamb
Part 10

By Takuan Seiyo

In the bog of Demonic Mendacity

The undead zombies of the academy

The academic creators of postmodernism, most of them PhDs in philosophy of the German kind, were all far-left socialists around the time that their creed showed its decisive failure as theory and as morality. The booming prosperity and relative freedom of the West and of its working class, particularly in super-capitalist America of the 50’s, belied Karl Marx’s dialectics. The Western proletariat, instead of rising against its capitalist masters, was busy buying homes, cars and TVs, and enjoying the good life. Meanwhile, the communist Valhalla, the Soviet Union, revealed itself after Stalin’s death to have been a machine of mass murder of the malnourished, run by a megalomaniac monster.

“Postmodernism,” wrote the philosopher Stephen Hicks in Explaining Postmodernism, “is the academic far Left’s epistemological strategy for responding to the crisis caused by the failures of socialism in theory and in practice. Confronted by harsh evidence and ruthless logic the far Left had a reply: That is only logic and evidence; logic and evidence are subjective; you cannot really prove anything; feelings are deeper than logic; and our feelings say socialism.” ^[1]

Conveniently, by the middle of the twentieth century, epistemology and linguistics had already turned into gibberish, not the least due to earlier efforts by illustrious names such as Russell and Wittgenstein. Hicks quotes the German philosopher-scientist Moritz Schlick whose prolific output in the 1920’s revolved around issues such as the meaninglessness of the proposition: “Does the external world exist?” and the corollary issue of the null connection between cause and effect, belabored by Wittgenstein.

Of course any Zen adept would react to the question “Does the external world exist?” by whacking the questioner with a staff, thereby proving the existence and, later, when the blue-red welts formed on the budding philosopher’s backside, the causality as well. But the peculiar perversions of 19^th century German philosophy and the great catastrophe of World War I have somehow leeched the vital sap of life from European culture. Instead of climbing or hewing or just classifying rocks, the philosophes preferred being chained to them in Plato’s cave, arguing endlessly about the flickering images.

While Reality’s thorough thrashing of socialism sent many Left intellectuals into terminal despair, for others the crisis meant only that a more radical assault on capitalism was needed. Instead of accepting that Reality had proved them wrong, determined academic socialists declared Reality itself null and void, along with reason and even the possibility of telling true from false and right from wrong. Consequently, as Hicks puts it, postmodernism has recast the nature of rhetoric into “persuasion in the absence of cognition” — a sheer political weapon with which to swat aside and overpower any opposition to socialism in any form.

“The regular deployments of ad hominem, the setting up of straw men, and the regular attempts to silence opposing voices are all logical consequences of the postmodern epistemology of language. Stanley Fish [snip] calls all opponents of racial preferences bigots and lumps them in with the Ku Klux Klan. Andrea Dworkin calls all heterosexual males rapists and repeatedly labels ‘Amerika’ a fascist state. With such rhetoric, truth or falsity is not the issue: what matters primarily is the language’s effectiveness.” ^[2]

Postmodern (“PoMo”) ideology explicitly rejects truth and logic. In such a framework, it’s easier to understand the curious mixture of presentism and relativism we visited earlier. Hicks summarizes this perverse phenomenon as: “On the one hand, all cultures are equally deserving of respect; on the other, Western culture is uniquely destructive and bad.” He adduces enduring examples of postmodernist theory blatantly at odds with historical facts:

Postmodernists: The West is deeply racist.
Fact: The West ended slavery for the first time ever, and racist ideas are on the defensive only in places where Western ideas have made inroads.

Postmodernists: The West is deeply sexist.
Fact: Western women were the first to get the vote, contractual rights, and the opportunities that most women in the world are still without.

Postmodernists: Western capitalist countries are cruel and exploitive of their poorer citizens.
Fact: The poor in the West are far richer than the poor anywhere else, both in terms of material assets and the opportunities to improve their condition.

The place of honor in the postmodernist Pantheon belongs probably to Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). Derrida’s main task in life was to help advance Marxism by deconstruction of the rational foundations of the West. An academic superstar, the list of universities where he coughed the infecting mist into the brains of adoring tens of thousands included, among others, France’s three most prestigious universities: Sorbonne, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and École Normale Supérieure (ENS), Johns Hopkins, Yale, New York University, The New School for Social Research, Stony Brook University and the University of California at Irvine.

The Australian mathematician and architectural critic Nikos Salingaros summed up Derrida’s “contribution” to Western Civilization as a lethal virus absolutizing subjectivity, motivated by the will to destroy ^[3]:

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