Debunking Postmodernism

By
Sean Ewart

Somewhere in North Africa a 12 year old girl has been taken from her family's home, held down and, without pain medication, had her clitoris removed by a dull blade. About 3 million women undergo female genital mutilation a year, a tradition inspired by centuries of gender inequality, and yet international outrage has been incredibly underwhelming. So as the dull knife blade rips apart this young girl's clitoris, destroying her chances for future sexual enjoyment, increasing her chances of complications during pregnancy, the world watches and says, “who are we to judge her culture?”

This intellectual and moral impotence is the result of post modernism. Born out of the ashes of colonialism and baptized by the bleeding hearts of Western academics, postmodernism rejects notions of truth and right, favoring instead moral and intellectual limbo wherein judgment is condemned and action is impossible. More than mere high minded rhetorical mumble-jumbo, postmodernism and its proponents represent a growing paralysis threatening to erode our ability to act against injustice. The postmodernist is at once the defender of apathy and the catalyst for blind indulgence of the evil and the foolish.

Postmodernism is the idea that there are no boundaries, save those culturally defined. "The difference between people and ideas is... only superficial." These are the words of Richard Rorty and are typical of the postmodern ideal in which there are no absolutes (of this the postmodernist is absolutely sure) and no one is qualified to pass judgment on another. In essence, postmodernism rejects all notions of right and wrong, preferring instead the comfort of an insulated world wherein female genital mutilation is on the same moral ground as saving babies from burning buildings. The postmodernist is paralyzed by an inability to distinguish differences and a fear of discontinuation. It is a philosophy which does nothing more than foster apathy and blind indifference to the real problems which plague our world.

That postmodernism is responsible for the birth of trust-funded thrift shop aficionados comes as no surprise – after all, in a world where nothing really means anything, irony is king. Faux news, 'high-minded' drum circles, and a vocabulary increasingly filled with ironic catch phrases (“that's ill!”) are the more inane products of the philosophy which is skeptical of definition. It is the Unitarian Universalism of social philosophy wherein everything is celebrated as equally valid and thus everything is equally patronized and watered down. By refusing to draw boundaries, the postmodernist is left to view the world as a series of ironic happenings which are devoid of actual meaning; he may celebrate the things he sees (different cultures, religions, races, traditions, etc), but only ironically.

To credit the postmodernist with an acute sense of cultural sensitivity is to overlook a crucial factor causing this supposed enlightenment: Just as religious pluralism saps religion of content and meaning, postmodernism (the idea that meaning is entirely subjective) denies the value of cultural traditions. There is, thus, nothing special separating the traditions of the Arabs from those of the Irish; these cultural differences are just a bunch of ironic happenstances. And while the purveyors of these ideas may appear all-inclusive and multicultural, they must, at the end of the day, truly value their own presupposed ideals higher than whatever culture they are looking at.

This is the essential, and true, irony of the whole thing; the postmodernist believes that there is nothing besides relativity and subjective “knowledge,” and regardless of which culture they look at, they refuse to actually evaluate the traditions and merits beyond a casual observation. Postmodernism is the dogmatic refusal of dogma in every sense of the word, and is thus doomed to live on irrelevant to the on-goings of the world around it. By refusing to give value to anything, you take value from everything. In the words of choreographer Twyla Tharp, “There's this expression called postmodernism, which is kind of silly, and destroys a perfectly good word called modern, which now no longer means anything.” And that's the whole point.

And so back to North Africa where our 12 year old girl is having her clitoris removed according to cultural traditions spanning centuries. Once the clitoris is removed and her vagina sewn up enough to make intercourse a veritable form of torture, she will be considered a woman and a member of the community. This is wrong in the most fundamental sense and yet the postmodernist can say nothing against it; “its their cultural legacy,” they say, “who are we to judge?” Martin Luther King Jr. said that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, and in doing so he assumed that judgments would need to be made about what is unjust and what is not. Just as we should value the many positive elements of cultures the world round, we should not be so blind as to gloss over the many parts of the human experience we would be better off without – like female genital mutilation. Any philosophy which gives shelter to this practice is abhorrent.

“What postmodernism gives us ... is a multicultural defense for male violence - a defense for it wherever it is, which in effect is a pretty universal defense.” Feminist thinker Catharine MacKinnon hit the nail on the head. However, I would improve upon this quote by saying: postmodernism is a multicultural defense for injustice generally; a universal philosophy that gives shelter to the most atrocious of human behavior and suppresses justice. It is a philosophy which must be brought down.

For more on postmodernism and hipsters check out: "Bill Murray as a Hipster Icon," and "A Portrait of the Hipster as a Young Man."