How Postmodernism Really Fits into the Picture

In thinking about modern political ideology I have tended to think about it the way philosophers and political scientists seem to me to generally do--to start with its epistemology, and its assumptions about human nature and society, and how society could and should be organized, and the conclusions it draws from these premises.

So have I done with postmodernism. In its misanthropic view of human beings, its disregard for reason as a basis for knowing or ordering the world, its rejection of universalism in favor of a stress on identity, its disdain for progress and projects of human emancipation, it rests squarely within the classical conservative tradition, and indeed its darkest quarters (think de Maistre even more than Burke, with this more than confirmed by intellectual historians alert to its lineage by way of aspiring court philosopher to Hitler Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche et. al.), with all this more than acknowledged by those who actually pay attention to politics (like a few CIA analysts who definitely understand these things a good deal better than a great many academics of whom I am aware).

Alas, as I have personally discovered, you can explain this over and over again until you are out of breath and get only blank stares bespeaking stupidity from most people, to whom all that stuff is quite alien and, they are certain, entirely irrelevant. They are sure that the possibilities of knowledge, the nature of human nature, the character of society, the prospects and perils of guided change, have nothing to do with anything. In an American framework, for example, there is what the folks on FOX News tell people to think, which is "conservatism"; there is what the folks on MSNBC tell people to think, which is "liberalism"; and all this tells them that postmodernism is a "left" thing. Q.E.D.. (What's Q.E.D.? one may ask them. They won't be able to tell you the Latin words it stands for, or what the English equivalent is, they just know that it's something that lets people feel smug after they have made their point--and feeling smug is all they care about.)

Certainly it never occurs to them that even with all this being the case the supposed "left" may be just another flavor of right; that what they are looking at could well be a collision of different right-wing nationalists, rather than the right with anything like the old, universalist, left, from which the postmoderns of today have grown quite far removed, standing for the total opposite as, rather than concerning themselves with the problems of Society, they turn their attention instead to the problems of the Self.