Post Truth

Marcuse

It is bizarre to see so many on the Left now accusing Donald Trump of a “post truth” attitude. And as if this is some new and terrible thing.

That is and was the "post-modern turn": that truth is subjective, that there is no absolute or objective truth, that truth is "socially constructed." As PBS sums it up, "Postmodernism is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality."

Lies no longer exist once you embrace postmodernism.

Rely on “impartial fact-checkers” to guard against “fake news”? Not going to work, once the journalism profession itself has embraced postmodernism. If truth is relative, neither facts, nor mathematics, nor logic, settle anything. Some feminists now argue that mathematics, science, and logic are "tools of the patriarchy." Ethics is now subject to "cultural relativism" rather than appeal to any first principles like Kant’s categorical imperative. As Marcuse wrote, “moral commands and prohibitions are no longer relevant." Postmodernism explicitly rejects scientific truth.

Derrida" self-proclaimed Marxist, denounced "logocentrism."

Where did all this come from? Certainly, it was not Trump’s innovation, It has been the core teaching of the New Left for the past sixty or more years. It is from Marcuse and the Frankfurt School. Marcuse's ideal society was, wrote Kołakowski, “to be ruled despotically by an enlightened group [who] have realized in themselves the unity of Logos and Eros, and thrown off the vexatious authority of logic, mathematics, and the empirical sciences.” Marcuse, it turn, was heavily influenced here by Heidegger, who was influenced by Nietzsche.

"Even the ears have walls," they wrote on the walls during the Paris uprising. From this font, for example, feminism comes, along with the newer emphasis on “gender rights”: the idea that “male” and “female” are purely social constructs. Scientific facts like chromosomes and human anatomy are now irrelevant.

Having pushed this idea for a good fifty or sixty years, it is funny to hear some on the left now complain that Donald Trump is supposedly embracing it. It is laughable to hear them suddenly troubled by “fake news,” when “fake news” has become the stock in trade of the establishment press.

Not that he is. As far as I can tell, he has not, as have the members of the New Left, ever expressly reserved the right to make up his own truths. You say he sometimes says things that are not true? And you assert this is a new thing for politicians?

How’s that one for a made-up truth?

Heidegger

Perhaps it is not hypocrisy. If you follow the wonderland logic of postmodernism and the New Left, that truth is whatever I want it to be, then I guess it follows that anyone who disagrees with me is either lying or simply denying reality. Any news I do not like is, by definition, “fake.” There can be no question here of others having equal rights. Unless I choose to allow it. There is left only one way, of course, to settle disputes: might makes right. Whoever is in power gets to do as they like.

You will note that Heidegger embraced the Nazis in their day, who in turn embraced Nietzsche. There is an obvious sympathy of attitudes.

Still, the accusation seems pretty ironic. Because a big part of Trump's appeal to his many supporters is that, unlike the usual politicians, he tells it straight. He speaks the truth.

One example is his taunt of Clinton, or Obama, to just once call Islamic terrorism Islamic terrorism. Or how about hearing the Democratic candidates all publicly disown the statement that "all lives matter"? Trump took the flak for saying, sensibly, that he reserved the right to challenge the election results if they looked bogus. He could have taken the easy political path of insisting he would not, like Hillary Clinton. Who then, of course, when she lost, challenged the election results.

Political correctness, itself a part of the New Left/postmodernist turn, at its base holds that saying a thing is so matters more than whether it is so.

That is a good definition of lying.

The revolt against political correctness has been the very core of Trump's appeal.

The Mystery of Mateen's Motivation

The real culprit?

My friend the leftist columnist—let's call him “Xerxes,” so I don't have to keep saying “my friend the leftist columnist”-- sent out his column on the Orlando bloodbath just two days ago. I make that a week after the shootings.

He writes “ No one knows Mateen’s motivation.”

This is odd, because he says himself that Mateen phoned 911 during the shooting, and took the trouble to state his motivations. Several times.

This weird blindness has not only afflicted my friend, of course. I have seen it in most accounts in the mainstream media. They all seem to sit around somewhere puzzled. Somehow, it was the gun that did it. Naughty gun. It might not have looked like an AR-15, but it had to be an AR-15, too. The US Department of Justice has even released a transcript of the 911 call in which they tried to actually delete any reference to Mateen's motivations.

What is going on here? More evidence that the world is mad? Being out of touch with external reality, after all, kind of defines that experience.

In the case of my friend, he concludes that it is all down to “fundamentalism,” which, he then clarifies, means “specifically, American right-wing religion.”

Mateen was a registered Democrat.

Fundementalism is specifically a movement within American Protestantism. As a Muslim, Mateen was certainly not fundamentalist in that sense.

More generally, and in common discourse, “fundamentalism” has also come to mean someone who reads the scriptures of their religion in a strictly literal sense, as the fundamentalists do and did.

This tendency, of course, has nothing to do with politics. Reading your scriptures literally does not make you either Republican or Democratic. If, on the whole, the Protestant “fundamentalists” do tend to be right wing politically, then so, according to surveys, do those who take religion seriously in any sense. Was Mother Teresa a fundamentalist? Was Gandhi? Joan of Arc? Saint Francis? Is a Benedictine monk a fundamentalist?

It might be instead that there is a moral problem, not merely a problem of scriptural interpretation, behind such current left-wing policies as unisex toilets, abortion on demand, or a legal obligation to cater gay weddings. A generation or two ago, being religious did not equate to being “right wing” politically. Good Catholics generally voted for Kennedy. Aimee Semple McPherson was a fan of FDR and the New Deal.

In this second sense, of taking his scripture, whatever the particular scripture, literally, Mateen was not a “fundamaentalist” as far as we can tell. Yes, there is a tenet of sharia that calls for death as the penalty for sodomy. But then, the sharia is not the Qu'ran, and is not even based on a literal reading of it.

Moreover, Mateen actually—has anyone else even noticed this?--does not say he is shooting anyone because they are gay. Intimates and previous acquaintances say he was gay himself. He says he is shooting them in protest against the bombing of Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Unless they went and redacted something else they're not telling us about.

So, yet again—has the world gone mad, were they always mad, or are they really that dishonest?

Yes, the world has probably always been insane. But we have a special problem here, and this example illustrates it. The reason we have a culture war is that we have lost all possibility of civil discourse. The reason we have lost all possibility of civil discourse is that one side no longer accepts any rules. There is no longer anything common to appeal to: no evidence can be of any weight, not even the evidence of the senses, no morals, and no logic.

That is the explicit agenda of postmodernism, and it did not begin with postmodernism. It saturates feminism: a woman can be and do whatever she wants, and if all established moral codes say otherwise, the problem must be with all established moral codes, and they must be condemned. It can never be with her desired action. That would be oppression. It was certainly already there with Marcuse, in the Sixties and even the Fifties. It is seen plain in the supposedly Marcusan slogan found on some wall during the Paris uprising: “Be careful! Even the ears have walls!”

By this now-common doctrine, “reality” and “truth” are whatever you will them to be. And nobody gets to say any different. It is all a matter of the triumph of the will.

Marcuse claimed in turn to find it all in Marx. He may be right; some part of it at least seems implied in the Marxist idea that man is infinitely malleable. Maybe all of it follows.

I think you can also find some of it, maybe by implication all of it, in Martin Luther, who considered “faith” the essential human act and a moral choice. If he meant “faith” in the sense of trust, all well and good. But a lot of people, and maybe Luther himself, take it to mean “belief.” So, indeed, we even talk of religious people generally as “believers.”

Probable co-conspirator.

Wrong. Truth is not a matter of choice.

I admit that Imyself, once, as a college freshman, even as late as grad schoool, found this attitude exhilarating, liberating. But it is logically nonsense, morally evil, and the death of all community. If everyone gets to choose their own reality, what happens when two people with different realities meet? The only option for resolution is for one to dominate or kill the other.

Hitler and Mussolini were very much in this tradition.

And it is where we are headed, more and more each year.