Postmodernism's greatest danger is its denial of a universal human nature, seeing this, in spite of compelling historical and scientific evidence to the contrary, as primarily socially, rather than biologically, determined.
By asserting that power exclusively, rather than innate human drives, dictate history, it propagates the convenient myth that oppression belongs solely (and innately) to the powerful, and virtue solely (and innately) to the powerless.
This sounds eerily like the portentous musings of the revolutionaries of earlier times.
This framework denies our universal, often brutal, self-interest, enabling an unwarranted attribution of virtue, and a dangerous, and ultimately, destructive projection of blame.
Postmodern ideology rests on the premise that all human psychology and morality are purely social constructs. In doing so, it discards the timeless reality that human nature— relatively constant across time, place, and scale—is fundamentally self-interested. This truth is evident not only in the complex modern state, but also in indigenous societies throughout history.
The historical record presents a compelling challenge to the romanticized view of the "noble savage" legacy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Anthropological and historical realities, and numberless written accounts, reveal that indigenous populations, much like complex civilizations, were subject to the same drives of warfare, territorial expansion, dominance, ego, and competition for resources.
Human ambition, and a capacity for brutality, are universal, they are not exclusively byproducts of specific, systemic power structures. They were not invented by the West.
The postmodern assertion that tyranny and oppression are strictly the domain of those who possess power, whether they are nations, institutions, or individuals, is a gross overstatement, or at best misrepresentation, of the truth ... as is its converse assumption, that the powerless are inherently virtuous, and would remain so, even when the opportunity presents to be otherwise.
This worldview completely contradicts the historical fact that violence, exploitation, and the desire for supremacy, are bound to human nature itself. The stories of North American Indians, pre-European Maori, and of most communist regimes, in spite of efforts to bury this information, bear evidence of this fact.
By refusing to acknowledge this universal reality, postmodernism has enabled, and embedded, a harmful dynamic of perpetual denial by some and projection by others.
If oppression is purely the invention (or orientation) of some, and not of others, then the marginalized, or less powerful, are absolved of their inherent human flaws, divorced from their own histories, and deprived of agency and responsibility.
This does not mean that past injustice cannot, or should not, be put right, but it warns us that every truth pushed too far, or unshaped by other truths, becomes a lie, and only ever displaces one potential tyranny with another. The postmodern idea is not necessarily wrong in all its respects, it is its isolation from counter-argument, from complexity, and from common sense ... and its potential to undermine modern safeguards to human excess ... that has made it so very very dangerous.
The recent brutal murder of Henry Nowak in the UK, the actions leading up to this, the reaction of police, and the British Prime Minister, and the comparative silence of the left, present a compelling object lesson in what happens when bad ideology displaces reason, when collective finger pointing displaces personal responsibility, and when the price of liberty is considered too high.
Caleb Anderson, a graduate history, economics, psychotherapy and theology, has been an educator for over thirty years, twenty as a school principal.
3 comments:
The concept of the Noble Savage is dependent on race. The Maori, North American Indian etc are always depicted as some clean, hygienic group living an idyllic life. Early Western man is always depicted as dirty, slovenly groups of brutish oafs.
You are absolutely right Caleb. I am reminded of a famous quote:
‘Men go mad suddenly, and all at once, but only slowly regain their sanity, and only one by one.’
Caleb Anderson s presenting here one side of the perennial argument as to what shapes human nature, genes or environment. Human nature is not a "blank slate" as an extreme environmentalist might have it, but neither are we slaves to our genetic inheritance as Anderson implies.
A wise philosopher once observed that before Darwin it was necessary to emphasize humans' similarity to animals (against the religious notion that God made man in his own image), but that after Darwin it was necessary to emphasize the difference.
What makes humans different is that millennia of co-operative social labour has enabled us to a certain extent to transcend our biological inheritance. The anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has illustrated this neatly. If you put 300 humans inside an aircraft cabin for a 12-hour flight, when you open the doors at the end you might find a few ruffled feathers and strained nerves, but you also might see some newly-formed friendships. If you put 300 chimpanzees on the same flight, when you open the doors at the end you would find bloody bodies and severed limbs everywhere.
Post modernism's great weakness is not so much as it denies the existence of "a universal human nature", but that it holds that concepts and ideas are arbitrary constructs undetermined by the material world, and even that there is no such thing as a knowable reality at all, subject to objective laws. It is true that as Anderson says "Anthropological and historical realities, and numberless written accounts, reveal that indigenous populations, much like complex civilizations, were subject to the same drives of warfare, territorial expansion, dominance, ego, and competition for resources." But neither Anderson with his crude biological determinism or a post modernist can explain why this is so.
It is because most of human history has been marked by a relative scarcity of material resources. There has not been enough wealth to go around, meaning that humans have not fully been able to restrain their biological urges of competition. But is the case that at the present stage of technological and scientific development for the first time in history there is enough material abundance to guarantee every human on Earth a decent standard of living and the opportunity to pursue a rich cultural life, if only we could get rid of this oppressive current ruling social and economic system which we have inherited from our past.
But even then, as Leon Trotsky wrote, "competition, whose roots lie in our biological inheritance, having purged itself of greed envy and privilege, will indubitably remain the most important motive of culture under communism too..."
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