Is postmodernism to blame for our society losing its way?

Is there one philosophy we can blame for all that has gone wrong with human reasoning? Some believe so – it goes by the name of postmodernism.

A method of thought that traces its roots to Europe in the years after the second World War, postmodernism rejects traditional concepts of rationality, objectivity and universal truth. Instead, it emphasises the diversity of human experience and multiplicity of perspectives.

Its figureheads are continental intellectuals like the Nazi sympathiser Martin Heidegger and the turtleneck-wearing liberal Michel Foucault. While postmodernists can be found on the left and the right, they are united by what the historian Richard Wolin describes as a rejection of the Enlightenment project – the idea that scientific reasoning is the best way of gaining knowledge.

In his barnstorming critique of postmodernism, The Seduction of Unreason, which he wrote almost 20 years ago, Wolin proclaimed “one of the peculiarities of our times is that Counter-Enlightenment arguments once the exclusive prerogative of the political right have attained a new lease of life among representatives of the cultural left”.

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Prominent postmodernists today include Slavoj Žižek – whose paradoxical utterances once earned him the title the Borat of Philosophy – and Judith Butler, an influential new-wave feminist who argues that gender is a social construct or “performance”.

On the one hand, postmodernism has been described as the “philosophical parent” of wokeness. The American philosopher Susan Neiman is one of its chief critics on this front – blaming postmodernist identity politics for dividing the left. On the other hand, postmodernism has been blamed for creating a distrust in social institutions to the benefit of the far right – hence Donald Trump was portrayed by some as the first “postmodern president”.

But is postmodernism being misrepresented? Like any label, it can be somewhat fluid.

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In literature, James Joyce is seen as the last great modernist and Samuel Beckett as the first great postmodernist. Their two styles mirror the change within western philosophy. Joyce’s work is rooted in history and place, drawing on centuries of scientific and cultural references. Beckett’s work is stateless and, in the ordinary sense, plotless – characters are without nationality and sometimes without body.

The horrors of the second World War are significant to postmodern thinking. That European “civilisation” could give rise to the Holocaust not only dented faith in progress but also provided the impetus for postmodernism’s key insight, which is that objectivity is a disguise for power. Globalisation and technological development have arguably hastened the postmodern advance.

“The postmodern individuals feel comfortable almost everywhere, but they don’t belong anywhere. They have made instability and change their way of being and do not feel a strong attachment to any particular place,” Adrián Gordaliza Vega writes in a new book, The End of Everything: A Society in Transition (PL Press).

“They are globalised individuals, unconcerned about the past or the future, always immersed in a changing present . . . And this is not only applicable to the physical or geographical space they inhabit but also to their ethical, aesthetic and political thinking. ‘Liquid individuals’, or ‘fragmented’ or ‘postmodern’ (depending on the version that is preferred), do not necessarily have such strict and firm values, they can change them according to each situation.”

Vega, a Spanish-British philosopher, admits “it is very difficult to find individuals who are 100 per cent postmodern”. However, “in western capitalist societies we all have a varying percentage of postmodern sensibility in us”.

One of the main charges against postmodernists is that they get it wrong on the key ethical questions of the day. By suggesting every power dynamic is inherently evil, they conflate minor injustices with major atrocities. At its worst, postmodernism can seem self-indulgent or even cynical.

Wolin cites the example of postmodern responses to the 9/11 terror attacks on the United States. Žižek had described them as a “Hegelian lesson” that taught the West about its own record of evil. Although Žižek’s revulsion over the attacks was never in doubt, his musing that “America got what it fantasised about” is cited by Wolin as further evidence that postmodernism is “morally impotent and politically clueless”.

Fast forward to 2023 and you can find plenty of what political scientists call “useful idiots” defending regimes like Russia and Iran (not that Žižek falls into this category). How many of these, however, are pure postmodernists? It is unlikely that any of the agent provocateurs and relativists who make excuses for Vladimir Putin, or who argue that human rights are a “western construct”, have read Foucault or ever intend to.

The other main charge against postmodernism – and this sticks a bit better – is that it ignores the cost of upending old certainties and scrapping historical traditions. To Wolin, postmodernists “bask in the freedoms of political liberalism . . . while biting the hand that feeds them”. By promoting “difference” over a universal human perspective, they create a political movement where “reason is little more than the ideological window dressing for Eurocentricism and its attendant horrors. By making what is different the same or identical, reason, so the argument goes, is implicitly totalitarian”.

Even the most open-minded individuals can run out of patience with postmodernism. It can have an effect similar to that of watching one Beckett play too many – it was clever the first time you saw it but after a while you start longing for something with a relationship to facts.

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Vega vocalises this frustration when considering the postmodern approach to national identity. “Let’s say that an individual is born in Germany and lives in Berlin for a large part of their life. Is this person German? What does it mean to be German? Are all Germans the same? Is there such a thing as ‘the essence of Germany’? Everything that modern philosophy considered objective, in postmodern philosophy becomes subjective. Everything that supposedly defines us – gender, nationality, profession, social class, marital status, studies, etc – is called into question.”

The worry is that if we keep doubting we become irretrievably lost. “Postmodernity questions any attempt at describing or defining people and things,” says Vega.

However, asking what it means to be German only seems daft to someone settled in their German identity. It is a very relevant, and indeed urgent, question for someone like an Afghan asylum seeker in Düsseldorf who is trying to find a footing somewhere in the world where they don’t feel persecuted or unwelcome.

Here we arrive at one of the key defences of postmodernism. Its attention to individual experience over the collective means it can help to give voice to marginalised groups. If postmodernism is becoming more prominent in western society it is because certain groups have felt unheard until now.

As Nelson Mandela used to say, “it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle”. If individuals feel mainstream discourse excludes their experience then postmodernism is a weapon to advance their cause.

Ask a sage

Can anything be accepted as true?

Michel Foucault replies: “We should admit ... that power produces knowledge..; that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.”