Sure, everyone hates postmodernism now. But that wasn’t always the case. From the 80s until just a few years ago, the ultimate experiment in German Idealist philosophy merging with French pretension and Anglo-Protestant moralism was regarded as not only serious, but became the dominant intellectual framework in numerous parts of the world’s academic establishments. This percolated down via midwit linguistic turns to indirectly influence media discourse. It became fashionable to state that the world could not exist outside of human perception and that relativity ruled over all. It made one seem worldly.

The key word here is “seem”.

Those rooted in materialism, from actual Marxism to speculative realism and everything in between, we stood strong against this. But our internally diverse camp was the outlier. The unfashionable. The heretics. This could be heard in universities themselves, with postmodernists dismissing ideas for being old, rather than on their merits or lack thereof, as if longevity was a net negative. An ironic position for anyone young enough to have missed the Summer of 68, considering the specifically Boomer roots of postmodernism, but I digress.

Postmodernism, despite its many pretensions to radicalism, was anything but. It was the left wing of neoliberalism. Its cultural posturing against the liberal hegemony was, like their view of culture itself, entirely performative and superficial. They, like the CIA-backed modern art projects of the Cold War, were effectively an anti-establishment coded pro-establishment movement. A quest to give the illusion of radicalism to something that would never challenge financial or political power and would always, ultimately, serve as cover for the actual lack of choice on offer. A grand show to defang and disarm actual radicalism by betting, correctly, that many reformers were just as dumb and easily distracted by culture war as the conservatives they criticized. 

It claimed to break old meta-narratives and to question archaic values, but in practice it was always a new form of Protestantism: strident, moralist, and, ironically, obsessed with building the very monoculture it claimed to be combatting. So-called punks demanded censorship to protect the feelings of the aggrieved, diversity impact statements became humiliation rituals to enforce group loyalty, all while diversity of thought was cast out in favor of a missionary project. Christian slave morality reborn under a rubric of cutting edge social justice. A post-structuralist inquisition charged with rooting out heresy.

Postmodernism did its job. It destroyed the capacity of recovery for an already structurally crippled opposition be it the left, scholarship, protest movements, journalism, the antiwar movement, and it did so under the guise of bringing about a bold new future. It did bring a future, but  for Silicon Valley Neofeudalists. The Man could hardly have asked for a better ally. This was entirely predictable to those of us who were not postmodernists, but missed by its true believers so eager to call us unfashionable old timers. Neoliberalism believes that the human race is made up of autonomous individual units as its most important component, as does postmodernism. But this claim has never, ever been true. It can only be believed by ignoring all of archeology, anthropology, and history. The community has always ruled, and communities are divergent based not on ‘social construction’, which comes as an after the fact justification rather than a primary mover, but by geography, ecology, and historical circumstance. Things no individual, and often even no group, have control over.

If more scholars had been open to ignoring anthropocentrism and studying humanity more like we do other animals, they would have skipped this awkward phase of correlationism (the goofball belief that human consciousness is the ultimate arbiter of reality) and instead treated us like the very real biological species that we are. As John Gray stated: 

“In denying that the natural world exists independently of our beliefs about it, postmodernists are implicitly rejecting any limit on human ambitions. By making human beliefs the final arbiter of reality, they are in effect claiming that nothing exists unless it appears in human consciousness.”

This is anti-nature and anti-reality. It is, ironically, a resurrection of the moralism and protagonist syndrome-fueled pathos of the Abrahamic religions. The world is nothing but a playground for our moral journey, the correlationists claimed. It is positively evangelical.

It should be obvious this is a weird and contradictory position for a relativist to take. And this brings me to my key point: Postmodernism got almost everything wrong, from politics to education to how power works, but the thing it is most criticized for now that it is no longer popular- its cultural relativism- was actually the one thing it got right.

Or perhaps more accurately, would have gotten right had they been consistent about it. 

Once you accept that humanity’s strength is adaptability, and this is what has fueled the species’ expansion, it becomes obvious that it is because we are adapting to new places as much if not more than adapting them to us. Ecology and geography rule the day. Those things are not universal. Migrating peoples, be they conquerors or refugees, are more likely to be assimilated by a new home than to make the new home a perfect copy of the old, even as they change it. The impact of physical reality is absolute and real, but the ways in which people adapt to its differing variables is divergent and will remain so going forward. Culture, as the outgrowth of this adaptation, is by necessity relativistic. They are all moving and changing, yes, but along different paths. Sometimes some merge with others or split from others, but the process is Taoistic, of eb and flow, not one of linear progress. Physical reality, which exists regardless of our opinions about it, is not one Platonic unified whole but rather a sea of churning probabilistic chaos which is in a cultural sense polycentric. It has truth, but that truth contains no universal moral values.

Postmodernism, ironically, claimed to uphold this but in actuality hated it. Seeking to suppress any heresy from its quest to serve the neoliberal drive of the autonomous global individual, it came to advocate hostility towards any non-liberal order or view that would make those trained by the professional managerial class’ values ‘feel unsafe’. It ended up rejecting the only thing it ever was right about- moral relativism. All while doubling down on solipsism as a world view. 

Meanwhile, the equally stupid backlash to the recession of the postmodern era, that of the (in denial) postmodern right has also got everything backwards, possibly in an even more terrible way. To the right (in Abrahamic cultures anyway) morality is absolute and unwavering, but real life is relativistic. The assumption is that the real world can be bent around morality. Similar in practice to the postmodern left’s obsession with culture forming, this version does not even admit the fungibility of values. In other words they will try to shape a real world that exists independently of human thought around non-material concepts that exist only in their mind.

Spoiler alert: It will fail, just as it has all the previous times it has been tried. For every push of the needle towards something they want, there will be an equal or greater pushback building continuously in reaction. A society may fall to theocracy only to see its people leave religion in droves (like Iran or post-reformation Europe) or racial or imperial chauvinism only to see its neighbors bandwagon against a drive to supremacy, leaving it contained (Spain, the Axis). 

This is because for all the yearning for an unreal ideal that marks the greatest flaw of humanity, there will always be a yearning to escape other people’s ideals. The problem is ultimately self-correcting.

So if there can be some primary takeaways from the intellectual dark age of the past few decades I see it as this: relativism only works with culture, and to be consistent and useful it must have limits, specifically geographic limits but also an understanding that cultures can and often should change themselves- but in doing so they will not merge with others but rather add to the medley of an ever-expanding natural selection. Relativism should be a partner, and not a foe, to the sciences, and it should never fall into the correlationist trap of claiming variable perceptions can shape material reality on their own. After all if there is one thing, aside from correlationist fantasies themselves that truly seems to unite all forms of idealist thinking, it is that of being useful idiots to whatever fad Silicon Valley and financial elites are dreaming up at the moment. And it is the rule of the nerds that must end, regardless of if they are fashionable nerds or not.

So postmodernism joins the ranks of all the other idealist philosophies it claimed to be breaking from: its obsession with critiquing power ignored that the actual root of power is material. It is force and it is logistics deployed to defend or increase one’s control over material factors. People and eras may have preferences one way or the other as to the purpose to which it is used but It is ultimately an amoral process with no universal model nor basis in the ideal. So in the end what really matters is not ideas, but hard physical reality. Realism wins again.

Which is good, because the last place one ever wants to be trapped is inside the mind of middling Oberlin professor with a writing style designed to obfuscate rather than elucidate.