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POST-MODERNISM IS A SELF-SERVING ICONOCLASM WHOSE END-GAME IS DEATH BY OBSOLESCENCE

Why has post-modernism taken hold so successfully, where did it come from and why does it continue to spread - despite the push-back and the warnings - a culture of mediocrity and reductive relativism that’s threatening to pervert centuries of Western thought and culture?

"We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable." -- Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)

The seeds of what’s become the global post modernist juggernaut were sewn in an unusual way for a cultural movement. It is rooted in a rejection of truth and an antipathy towards individual genius. It's has evolved into much more than just an academic school of Western thought. Today it has conflated itself through media (social media included) with a perverted democratisation of excellence that’s taken hold of vast swathes of “respectable” society and culture. In recent years the degraded redefinition of excellence has spread like a disease to erode truth and fact, disdaining expertise by somehow reducing it to an abusive power dynamic. This is a disastrous choice for us to be making as a society and if the trend isn’t reversed, we’re going to bankrupt Western thought and culture without hope of reprieve. This bankruptcy ends only one way: in our inevitable obsolescence, as the torch passes East and the West cannibalises itself on a banal descent into permanent irrelevance.

From its innocuous roots in late 1940s post-modernism has spread like a steady but relentless virus. It has become a formalised absolution from personal challenge, mobilising a kind of anti-ambition that’s kept virulent by successive generations of mediocre academics motivated by a seemingly bottomless well of intellectual vanity and tenured self-interest.

"Great spirits have always encountered the most violent opposition from mediocre minds." -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

A hundred individuals aspiring to creative genius will mostly fall short of the standard and most will have the intelligence to see the shortcomings are their own, be it cowardice or fear or insurmountable absence of virtuousity. How can intelligent academcs used to success reconcile falling short of genius they themselves worship more than any other human characteristic? Post-modernism has become the answer. It is the means to an end and it has served successive generations of post-war career academics - and their students. Just as the Nazis had bastardised Nietzsche to justify Aryan eugenics, the early post-modernists corrupted Heidegger’s rollback of temporal ontology (as the defining way to think about the world) to legitimise a rejection of the significance of all individual human beings in the creative process. The poison had entered the veins of post-war culture.

POST-MODERNISM AS A SICKNESS

In the years after the second world war, across societies in great flux with a demobilised but changed citizen spirit, post modernism was not at first a pervasive dogma. It was a convergence of genuinely blue sky sociology studying conditions in the immediate aftermath of war with philosophy chasing meaning in a mechanised relativistic universe. Philosophy and sociology might have kept themselves uncorrupted were it not for the arts - far more numerous and influential in an everyday sense - having been caught between a Joycean rock and a Woolfish hard place. Vladimir Nabokov, most famous emigre after Einstein, warned us what was going to happen in his greatest work, Pale Fire.

"Reality is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average "reality" perceived by the communal eye." -- Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)

Career academics, their fragile conceits needing a system of protection against the genius of modernism, were driven to post-modernist ideas which they quickly and self-servingly appropriated. Beat poetry was a first response to these trends, born in Columbia University but dispossessed almost immediately as the colleges closed ranks rapidly. Some version of this dichotomy played out in a hundred academies: tenured professors in the halls, modernist genius in portraits on the walls, the vitality and individuality worthy of their natural successors shut out, excluded, forced outside the institutions.

The battle lines were rapidly arranged. Post-modernism was the armor chosen by the academy.

It didn't take long for it to spread. The benefits to conceited mediocrity and fearful conservatives and entrenched comfortable nepotism and lazy hubristic intellectuals was soon obvious. Post-modernism calcified into a cross-faculty movement that's been consolidating power ever since. Generations later it dominates in universities, converges with democratised consumerism and infiltrates all facets of 21st century society. POST-MODERNISM AS NEOLIBERAL FREEMASONRY

Post-modernism, having taken over the arts faculties, cross-pollenated into the outside world to colonise much of the mainstream media. Its spread and tenacity is testimony to its lasting appeal and the temptation to succumb to those worst instincts will follow a person's whole career, readily at hand should an academic or artist or media hold-out go through moments of doubt or crises of confidence or face a choice between principled independent hardship and acceptance plenty and security in joining the club. Neoliberalism is the post-modernist economics heart of this choice and this is as good a definiton as any for the pressures exerted on non-members. It needs no guns and cudgels to achieve its ends.

But why is this particular club so bad? Isn’t neoliberalism better than totalitarian communism? Couldn’t post-modernist principles be liberating for young minds stifled by the straightjacket canon of past generations? This could have been argued until the 1980s though even then the post-modernist exponents were already the children of diminished progenitors. The nature of the temptation post-modernism offers is too strong for most to resist. The early post-moderns began as pale fire apologists cowed by the challenge of modernist genius.

The post-war academics were indeed a mixed bunch, elder statesmen increasingly marginalised by: well-organised successors greedy for authority but unable to use sheer talent to justify their positions, professional iconoclasts in pursuit of misguided but sincere notions of democratising the academy, hostile to received wisdom and suspicious of outlier excellence, career academics increasingly threatened by the ongoing intellectual diaspora from broken Europe closing ranks to formalise systems that levelled the playing field, etc. With a few exceptions, it was left to America to carry the torch of academic continuity for at least a generation 1950s until as late as the 1970s. Europe and now East Asia are no longer behind North America but the parochial professionalism of the baby boomer period has injected itself deeply on the institutions, post-modernism the mechanism of delivery, neoliberalism lubricating the ambitions of its moving parts.

Post-modernism is particularly pernicious, once sufficiently widespread, because it gives faithful advocates a multipurpose toolkit designed perfectly for its continued spread and consolidation. The toolkit is subtle and subject specific, cynical and utilitarian, honed - ironically - by thousands of extremely clever engineers of corporate academia. It covers jargon and linguistics, provides litmus tests to gauge friends and enemies, dividing and conquer transformation of safe zones promising academic enquiry and widespread publicity so long as there’s no gainsay of post-modernism's unwritten rules. Like in a masonic lodge, would-be exponents of their contemporary post-modernist doctrines (and goals) receive informal schooling in identifying one another.

Half a century later the network is well established throughout the world, organised like Islam and its cooperative imam-led cells, it has the academy locked in a stranglehold. Outsiders, outliers and would-be rebels can be pinpointed and delegitimised with remarkable precision, without compromising any individual mason (or, in most cases, committing any single institution). There’s no need to instruct how to exculpate rebels at the time of rebellion. Everyone in the lodge has the toolkit and already knows how to use it against objectionable targets.

TRUTH IS LIES - LOVE IS HATE - PEACE IS WAR - PLENTY IS STARVATION

What might've started as a complex of motivations driving numerous schools of thought soon became comfortable and entrenched, conformism aligning with conservativism to appropriate tradition, especially in the face of counter culture having mobilised opposing forces that might’ve risen to the challenge of modernist luminaries with genius of its own e.g. Jack Kerouac and the beats, Tennessee Williams and the Southern renaissance, James Baldwin and the civil rights movement. These individuals were pushed out onto the front line dismissing academia as unwelcoming or careers in journalism as unworthy. The post-modernist arsenal had its first wave of targets. An insidious schism between the academy and the individual had been transposed onto a global narrative of culture versus counter culture that’s been polarising ever since.

"The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly" -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

The battle for the hearts and minds of the many academic institutions and plethora of media outlets, print, radio, television, film was irreparably divisive by the end of the 1960s. Vietnam, hippy counter culture anti-nationalism and the Situationists student revolts against corporate consumerism brought the power of the state into direct conflict with the individual. The timing was fortuitous and the ideological conflict already well developed within the universities made post modernists natural bedfellows with those pushing the agenda of state authority. Both saw their chance: to marginalise dissenters, including untrustworthy writers and auteurs and non-conformists professors. And, worst of all, anyone cheating the median by presuming to exhibit genius out of context becomes a threat to the mainstream social order, subject to a takedown by every means available in the formidable post-modernist playbook.

DEATH OF THE AUTHOR GONE MAINSTREAM

The breakthrough of post-modernism into mainstream culture can be marked into two distinct phases: the silent expansionist war and the loud entrenched victory.

Roland Barthes, French philosopher and literary critic, provided the seminal concept that allowed post-modernism's craven iconoclasm to market itself into mainstream culture. His 1962 work Le Mort d'Auteur "Death of the Author" gave credibility to the academy's anti-individual disdain of virtuosity in art, claiming the hard won life works of artist and scientist alike without having to acknowledge the standards as an implicit challenge. Celebrity was permissible, even desirable, but would be no democracy of equal participants trying to establish an influential off-narrative platform if it boiled down to a meritocracy 'won' by genius and hard work. Personal nuance was to be aggregated into group identity, rules by the academy, propaganda by Barthes and other misrepresented thinkers.

All this contributes to make post-modernism a toolkit for appropriaton, aggregation, subjugation of the individual to the aim of the groups. Recently #metoo is the latest diseased manifestation, born of feminism and the wholly authentic attacking on misogyny as endemic patriarchy, turned into a way to bring down experts and excellence unwilling to confirm to the post-modern dictates of entrenched groupthink - in this case selected by gender.

"What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself." -- Roland Barthes Mythologies (1957)

The details of post-modernism evolution from movement to all-encompassing modus operandi needn't be repeated here. There are islands of resistance dotted around the academy and schools with sincere useful ideas not seeking to feed the growing monolith like structuralism, post-structuralism and deconstruction. These more authentic strains in philosophy and literary theory went through their own smaller conflicts, the leading lights like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Noam Chomsky marginalized in plain site, separated from the mainstream of the academy in special departments - a standard measure in the post-modernist manual when dealing with intransigent voices grown too noisy to gag or too marketable to deplatform into insignificance.

The most expedient aspects of post-structuralism and, increasingly, any new idea cropping up in academic circles, came to be identified fast then, notwithstanding the stubborn individuals whose future had to be isolation or exculpation, brought into the post-modernist mainstream. Post-structuralism was cannibalised into one of the most insidious movements of the latter culture war years: identity politics.

Feminism, civil rights, the fight against homophobia, legitimate movements all but in the hands of post-modern spin doctors were twisted to serve different goals and increase the firepower of the academy, the ambitious arbiters of culture. This has been one of the most criminal abuses of the post-modernist cabal.

"...for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word." -- Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)

The appropriation of feminism, sexuality and race should be a practical warning of the ultimate bankruptcy of post-modern ideology. Great women or great gay artists or non-white virtuosos aren't freed from the shackles of traditional homophobic white male-privilege, to aspire to whatever greatness might be attained by their individual unfettered potential. Instead this potential is cut away just as it is with any other presumption of genius. The method is different but the post-modern iconoclast has a diverse toolkit. Women are demeaned into ciphers, gays into icons all face no substance, black writers forced to be poster boys and poster girls ringfenced into representing only a narrow group identity that's as racially segregated as any pre-war ghetto. At best the new oppression is coercive rather than violent but great art is often inspired by oppression. It's certainly always born from distinction by individual outliers and to be deprived of this is to make mediocre currency of great potential. It's ironic that the casualties of this particular battle are the very people the identity political advocates pay lip service to free and defend.

WHERE DOES “DEATH OF THE AUTEUR” END?

From innocent beginnings in the late 1940s, the movement known as post-modernism has evolved into a freemasonry of entrenched anti-intellectual mob legitimacy. It is positioned in the mainstream, confident and on the attack. It has appropriated a dozen counter-cultures, rebranding and often inverting their original good, turning them into cultural sticks to beat society into submission: feminism into gender politics, anti-misogyny into #metoo, anti-homophobia into queer theory, the civil rights movement into affirmitive action, free speech constrained by political correctness. Post-modernism has become ubiquitous, unarguably legitimate stamped with academy credibilty, spread from the institutions through society by brigades well-taught graduates. These days there’s only one line of defence against the self-serving end-game post-modernism continues to drive towards: the independent individual.

Disorganised, unusual, independent, mostly atomised and often contrarian, the individual presents a disunited self-centred front - easy target for patient groupthinkers - but it’s the only other game in town. Complete victory for the post-modernist cabal will mean a society without genius, truth subjugated to expediency, a safe zone so widespread no-one notices it looks the same as obsolescence.

"The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning." -- Roland Barthes (1915-1980)

The first post-modernist generation passed the latest literary, linguistic and philosophical theory - especially schools of thought coming out of France and Germany - through the prism of democratised merit and everyman relativism to construct an extremely effective popular legitimacy serving the conceits of the tenured academy. The career academic had an arsenal fit for the destruction of reputations and the exculpation of non-conforming genius. The success of this “death of the author” spin, cloaked in the complex language of post-structuralism and other extant obfuscating theory gave the post-modernists a commanding position by the end of the 1960s. This hegemony expressed itself into mainstream culture through successive waves of graduates.

The post-modernist academy bound itself hand in glove with state authority, underpinned by an intellectual neoliberalism sold to the public as responding to the vocational demands of the free market. Anything of substance seeking to thwart the academy or the increasingly polarising state narrative was tarred with the ‘counter culture’ brush, ornery youth the first victims (e.g. the beat generation) but soon anything off-narrative was subjected to the same process of marginalisation (in the case of individuals) and appropriation (in the case of movements).

What little resistance remained in the arts faculties was picked off over the post-Vietnam decades, neoliberalism and consumer capitalism natural bedfellows with post-modernism in a way that solidified in the 80s, integrated branding in the 90s and had become received wisdom - unquestioned, presumed part of the natural order - by the millennium. Small wonder this entrenched cultural regulation adapted quickly to take hold of the internet and, in particular, ringfence social media, turning the latter into a vehicle for population control and echo chamber isolation of contrarian thinkers.

There was no way the post-modernist culture would allow itself to be challenged by changes to the dynamics of society. Vigilant, pro-active and anti-individual to the marrow, the mainstream must remain committed to post-modernisms proven methodology. No genius could be allowed to turn a platform into a pedestal. No expert could be given credible authority over truth, however many facts might be marshalled in support.

"The petit-bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the Other. If he comes face to face with him, he blinds himself, ignores and denies him, or else transforms him into himself." -- Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957)

There’s something incredibly human about the early motivations of the academics, humiliated by the challenge of modernist achievements, occupying positions of authority but incapable (or unwilling) to go to the same lengths to justify their cultural power. It was wrong but it wasn’t an incomprehensible show of weakness. Perhaps if it had been able to admit a little nuance - like humility - the future would have been different. It wasn’t, however. Committed to a reductive perversion of intellectual relativism, quick to define the opposition in counter cultural terms, increasingly partnered with state expediency, things only got worse and more widespread and more difficult to dislodge in the decades to come.

"I believe in the value of the book, which keeps something irreplaceable, and in the necessity of fighting to secure its respect." -- Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)

The rotten core of the post-modern movement remains throughout, though, and as it’s forced to greater lengths to prosecute an absolute authority, so much the reality and the impact on culture grow more extreme. Today it weaponises such awful characteristics as toxic envy and endemic narcissism. Mediocrity has become synonymous with common sense, conformity means to follow dogma and deny individual free thought. Power dynamics are abused daily, inverting expertise to a sin, traditions of excellence as oppressive patriarchy and individuality subsumed - whether you like it or not - into identity politics where transgression brings the most dire of consequences.

The post-modernist end-game is, by default, a mix of populism and passive aggression. There can be leaders, in the post-modern paradigm state, but these must be celebrities or accidents of ethnicity. Meritocracy becomes lottery - and lottery is an easier sell to a public convinced of its own self-worth but conditioned never to be examined, except for compelled social function. Death of the author and exclusion of individual genius makes life into a reality show - authenticity at arms length - an easy fit with slogans of democracy and universal median values. Equality itself is a twisted principle: not so much equality of outcome as equality of process. The whole system is delivered through the worst of human traits: vanity, egoism, outrage and opinion over complex nuance. It’s a recipe for mediocrity, at best, a disconnection with centuries of intellectual and cultural tradition that may not be restored. In a multifarious world, if we accept the broad sweep of history as led by the enlightenment West and the utilitarian East, it’s the former at risk of becoming obsolete.

We’re quick to spot the nightmare dystopian East when we hear about China and its surveillance social media scorecards for a billion citizens but the West is heading for worse. Mediocrity is a creeping death and will increasingly fall behind as the world moves forward. The Western traditions that have nurtured individual freedom and - quite rightly - arranged a natural order of achievement around encouraging and nurturing genius and original thought: all of this is at risk if the post-modernist social order achieves complete victory. Soon enough the voices of protest and their cries of “Shakespeare” “Newton” “Einstein” “Tesla” “Feinstein” “Goethe” “Nietschze” “Kerouac” “Dante” “Michelangelo” “Freud” “Jung” “Chomsky” “Orwell” will die away. What remains will be the echoing hubbub of an outraged mob that amounts to nothing more than an irrelevant cultural silence.

"There's a blaze of light in every word It doesn't matter which you heard The holy or the broken Hallelujah" -- Leonard Cohen (1934-2016)

#merton

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