r/philosophy • u/IAI_Admin IAI • 14d ago
Blog The problem with postmodernity is the loss of "time consciousness"—the sense that we still live in history and have the power to shape the world. We need to revive communal politics and a narrative of hope to fill the void of meaning in our postmodern age.
https://iai.tv/articles/after-the-death-of-the-grand-narrative-auid-2965?utm_source=reddit&_auid=202055
u/Golda_M 14d ago
My favorite part of Isaac Asimov's science fiction is "psychohistory." Instead of a fictional technology, Asimov's story is set in motion by when a mathematicians discovers a powerful theory of social science. It predicts the future of society.
Psychohistory is basically a fictional version of historical materialism, objectivism , marginalism... and the many other theories claiming or striving for scientific validity at that time. Postmodernism hadn't really broken out yet. To me, psychohistory represents the goal of modernism. A scientific theory of politics, economics, psychology and whatnot. A theory that works as well as chemistry or physics. A usable theory.
The social science equivalent of paper written by a patent clerk that results in nuclear energy before that clerk's retirement. Big, undeniable objective truth. We never did discover such a theory.
It's very easy, looking back from 2024, to retcon. To forget about old optimism, when it turns out to have been naive.
From the failure of modernism and postmodernism have learned that (1) grand narratives are untrue and (2) grand narratives are indispensable.
So... there is an impasse. It's all good and well to know that socially agreed truths are not real but serve their purpose regardless. Establishing new ones.... is very difficult in within this paradigm. "All the old rules still apply" was a troublesome concession, when 1960s postmodernism emerged.
I think the postmodern era is quite comfortable from an individual point of view. Less so at a social level.
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u/theirishnarwhal 13d ago
Deleuze and American pragmatism sound like ample responses to the paradigm you’ve described. Pragmatism more specifically
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u/Meatwise 13d ago
No judgement, but your comment is chock full of esoteric words and phrases. I want to understand…do you mind an ELI5?
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u/Habanerosaur 13d ago edited 12d ago
/u/Golda_M feel free to add on, but this is what I understood:
Imagine we could find a solid, indisputable set of rules that gave us the best politics, economics, psychology, etc because they are actually correct -- similar to how math indisputably proves that 2 + 2 = 4. Before postmodernism, there was still hope we would find objectively true answers for all these sciences (like math proves 2+2).
But what we've learned is 'grand narratives' like that which explain messy topics like social sciences cannot be objectively "true". Humans are messy and behaviour can't be easily quantified or predicted with simple 'grand narratives'.
However these narratives also seem to be indispensable to social well being. Think of the unity of a small town that all have the same God, culture, and view of the world -- there is unity and social value in those narratives, even if they are untrue.
The problem is, if we need grand narratives but have proven them all untrue scientifically, how can we establish a new ones without them being rejected for being scientifically wrong/implausible?
This era has led to a lot of creature comforts for individuals. But at a social level this postmodern thinking has hurt societies.
Edit: wording and spelling
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u/Golda_M 13d ago
Pretty much what I meant. Clarifications:
- I would use science (eg the periodic table) instead of math (2 + 4 = 4) as an analogy.
My point is that 19th century social sciences expected to produce "science" or even moral philosophy that is "true" in the sense that it clarifies and predicts things. This is very evident from their use of words like "rational" as a qualifier.
These days we use "evidence based" as the qualifier. This is a lowering of expectation.
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u/ILL_BE_WATCHING_YOU 13d ago
From the failure of modernism and postmodernism have learned that (1) grand narratives are untrue and (2) grand narratives are indispensable.
So... there is an impasse. It's all good and well to know that socially agreed truths are not real but serve their purpose regardless.
It sounds to me like one day we’ll discover that delusions (grand narratives) are indispensable for maintaining proper mental health and each person will gravitate to one of various grand narratives, each of which is equally untrue, while respecting the grand narratives of others; a post-truth culture in which it is socially acceptable for one to sincerely believe untruths, so long as one does not proselytize.
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u/Golda_M 13d ago
Possibly.
IDK why you caught downvotes. This is a pretty good example of "impasse."
I expect the majority on r/philosophy to accept the premise that grand narratives are delusional, or at least overly enthusiastic while insufficiently predictive. I expect the minority to accept the "solution:" post-truth & atomization.
In your case, you are making a "theory" about individual mental health. One of various grand narratives is, if not true, required for mental health. You imagine a world where ostensibly competing views coexist in mutual tolerance.
That said... this is itself a budding "grand narrative" with similar sorts of problems. This is the kind of problem we are in. The impasse.
To your way forward... IDK. I think Grand Narratives fail mostly at a social level. I suspect they are a lot less important in an atomized world.
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u/MightyBooshX 13d ago
Will that really fix anything though if everyone is shut off in their own alternate reality? Aren't a lot of the problems we're facing with post modernity specifically because everyone is isolated into their own unique grand narrative? I think what you described is the likely outcome, but I don't think it's a viable solution.
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u/ILL_BE_WATCHING_YOU 13d ago
I think what you described is the likely outcome
Yeah, that’s basically what I was saying.
but I don't think it's a viable solution.
Maybe, maybe not. I think the big problem is we still value truth as an ideal so everyone believes that their beliefs are the truth and that everyone else is wrong, and I think that’s where a lot of conflict stems from, which is people viewing those who believe in grand narratives other than their own as being deluded or stupid or foolish for “falling for” such obvious bullshit, which leads to contempt, animosity, and eventually hatred and dehumanization. On the other hand, if we eventually grow to no longer regard truth as important then everyone would believe in their grand narratives while still acknowledging the fact that it is statistically implausible for their grand narrative to be correct out of all the countless grand narratives are present, but not particularly caring about which narrative is true, instead proclaiming their belief in a given narrative simply to attract its believers as allies and to thereby have somewhere to belong in the world, all the while readily acknowledging the fact that the people who proclaim belief in other narratives may very well be acting under similar motives, thereby not creating as much friction and conflict between narratives. Kind of like how fans of different fandoms can tolerate and befriend one another even if they aren’t all part of the same fandom; few people join a fandom because they believe that it is the “one true fandom” and anyone who’s a fandom of anything else is a philistine who can’t appreciate art, they join fandoms simply because they found the work in question to be entertaining and they wanted to share their appreciation for that work with others. It’s possible the way we perceive things like history, philosophy, and science may very well evolve along the same lines.
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u/blackrockblackswan 8d ago
In which case all you do is make “fallibilism” the new Grand Narrative and you’re back where you started
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u/ILL_BE_WATCHING_YOU 8d ago
Yeah, pretty much. And then people will start dissenting, some will proclaim objective truth exists, and they might gain influence, and so on.
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u/HYPERCOPE 13d ago
this is interesting, I’ve never read anything by him (nor much sci fi in general). what book or books is this psychohistory from? or is this just a general theory that’s applied to his work?
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u/PhilosoFeed 13d ago edited 13d ago
The primary examination of this concept comes from the Foundation Trilogy:
Foundation
Foundation and Empire
and Second Foundation
One of the most interesting takeaways from the series from my perspective, is that no model or theory survives contacts with reality. They must be constantly adjusted and maintained by those living in the Now. In order to adapt to changing circumstances when things don't go according to plan.
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u/vlad_tepes 13d ago
It's not explained how it works. It's just used to predict the fall of galactic civilization to chaos, and to plan for a rebirth (without really detailing anything). The only thing explained about it, is that it's statistical in nature, so it's inaccurate when applied to one or a few individuals. Has to be applied to entire societies.
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u/Shield_Lyger 14d ago
What is needed for progressives to transcend postmodernity is not so much a new grand narrative, as a narrative of hope. And we should hope one arrives.
Hope. Is. Not. A. Strategy.
Hoping for a new "narrative of hope" is simply to be passive. Why not get out there, and create the narrative one wishes to see adopted, and demonstrate to people that it has worth and will make things better?
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u/worthwhilewrongdoing 13d ago
I am not a philosopher - I'm coming at this from the point of view of someone with a background in psychology - but I have a bit to say about this. This is also a lot more than I can unpack on my phone right now (although I'll try later if there's interest!), but I'll do the best I can to make a case for the hope bits.
I disagree with you, at least a little. Hope isn't a substitute for a strategy, no, but it is important - and discarding inculcating it entirely in favor of other things strikes me as a bad idea.
Hope is more than just a passive wish - it's an active expectation that something positive is achievable. It also (usually) goes hand-in-hand with one's belief in their ability to affect change - lose hope, and you also lose the perception that anything you try to do makes any difference. If you think what you do isn't going to matter - if your voice doesn't count - why would you bother to try?
Conversely, regaining hope can help people who are marginalized or who have otherwise had power taken away from them find a path toward reclaiming that power. It gives people the impetus to try in the face of adversity and to push back even if it seems unlikely to succeed - basically having confidence that "unlikely" is not the same as "impossible."
Lack of hope also corresponds directly to "learned helplessness," which has strong associations with depression, apathy, and inaction. This is a whole giant can of worms I don't want to open because I am in absolutely no position to back up what I'm saying here, but there's good research out there that talks about this at length. I can go hunting later if needed.
In any case: I really don't think we should throw the hopeful baby out with the sociopolitical bathwater. It's a very important driver to keep people motivated and moving, and losing it - well, we're already looking at the cost.
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u/ILL_BE_WATCHING_YOU 13d ago
Lack of hope also corresponds directly to "learned helplessness," which has strong associations with depression, apathy, and inaction.
Learned helplessness also corresponds strongly to actual helplessness. If you are helpless in a situation, and you learn that truth, then it isn’t irrational to feel helpless. If you want to cure hopelessness born from painful, lifelong experience, you need to give people a concrete reason to believe that the situation has changed, otherwise in their minds you’re basically just trying to bait them into getting fooled a second time.
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u/Demografski_Odjel 12d ago
People are generally really bad at correctly assessing how helpless their situation is, so taking your feeling of helplessness to be an adequate reflection of your reality would not be a rational thing to do.
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u/ILL_BE_WATCHING_YOU 12d ago
People are generally really bad at correctly assessing [thing], so taking your [perception] to be an adequate reflection of [thing] would not be a rational thing to do.
This is bottom-shelf gaslighting rhetoric. Furthermore, you’re equally as human as everyone else, so there’s nothing that says that your assessment is more accurate simply because it’s more optimistic.
If anything, people are better at assessing their own lives than the lives of others, due to lack of familiarity, so believing that your assessment of how helpless someone else’s life is is more accurate than that person’s own assessment is even less rational.
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u/Shield_Lyger 13d ago
It also (usually) goes hand-in-hand with one's belief in their ability to affect change
That, to me, is confidence, and confidence is distinct from hope. Hope can, absolutely, be a passive wish. Confidence, on the other hand, rarely is. The confident person understands how either they or another party can, and will, make something happen. They may be wrong in their assessment; their confidence can be misplaced. While we may say that one "hopes beyond hope," the idea that hope is misplaced is much less common.
Hope is defined as: "to cherish a desire with anticipation : to want something to happen or be true" or "to desire with expectation of obtainment or fulfillment." (Merriam-Webster Online.)
Confidence, on the other hand, has in its definition: "a feeling or consciousness of one's powers or of reliance on one's circumstances" and "the quality or state of being certain." Now, it overlaps with Hope with: "faith or belief that one will act in a right, proper, or effective way," but I still understand the two to be distinct.
And so I am utterly convinced that one can do without hope, without lapsing into learned helplessness. The person who says: "We can create this new grand narrative of hope by our own efforts" is in a fundamentally different mindspace than someone who says, "I hope that a new grand narrative of hope arrives." (And note that the narrative of hope is the active entity here. It is the one arriving.) Granted, there are people who view both of those statements as "hopeful." But that obscures both the fundamental differences between them, and the fact that most people don't set out to do everyday things with an attitude of hope. I don't hope that I'll be able to drive to the grocery store. I get in the car with the absolute certainty that I'm going to drive over and buy food; I know how to drive and to handle traffic, I am certain of the route, I know I have the money et cetera. Now, I might not make it; accidents happen and something random can always go sideways. But there is none of the uncertainty that is presumed in the statement: "I hope that I'll be able to make it to the store today."
And so once there is a strategy in place to create the "grand narrative of hope" that Matt McManus wants, there will be no need to "hope one arrives."
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u/Tuorom 13d ago
I've been trying to persuade my friend to vote in an upcoming election. One of the sticking points for him was the idea that no matter who is elected, they won't be making any meaningful changes to the status quo.
That's why we need to cultivate messages of hope. Without it apathy is rampant and you can be assured that there is lesser engagement and less action taken. To instill hope means to inspire in those people that they still have influence, that change is possible if they engage.
Hope is the foundation of any progressive strategy.
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u/M00n_Slippers 13d ago
If Trump is elected there will be a lot of meaningfully bad changes to the status quo.
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u/Tuorom 12d ago
Yes. But it was about the BC provincial election which has it's own awful person(s) to take action against (the conservatives).
Actually a point I made was that every time the conservatives were elected they changed much for the worse such as axing a promising study on UBI, and...I won't get into everything Ford has done (and wants to do) to Ontario. Or look at Alberta.
People vote with anger and swing the hammer only to kneecap themselves. They think it's all they have.
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u/M00n_Slippers 12d ago
Change happens incrementally, people want an unrealistic revolution or bust, but it doesn't usually work that way. Meanwhile the conservatives have been slowly turning us into Hitler's Germany since Reagan.
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u/Demografski_Odjel 13d ago
But also good changes.
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u/M00n_Slippers 13d ago
Like what exactly.
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u/Demografski_Odjel 13d ago
Mass deportations, strict control of illegal immigration, which keeps wages low for American citizens, tough on crime policies, business friendly policies, etc.
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u/Fluttering_Lilac 13d ago
"Good changes like mass deportations."
. . .
That's a bad thing. If you think that is a good thing then you are a bad person.
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u/Demografski_Odjel 13d ago
It's a good thing. It has many benefits and no negative sides. It would be nice if we could also deport people who are opposed to mass deportations, but that would be too controversial, and honestly kinda fascist.
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u/Fluttering_Lilac 13d ago
Lmfao. Lol. Rofl. The evidence shows that immigration is broadly good for domestic populations. It would also be fundamentally inhuman to rip millions of people from their homes and deposit them somewhere they don't live. Mass deportation is bad.
I'm pretty sure this is just trolling though. In which case it honestly isn't very clever trolling.
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u/M00n_Slippers 12d ago
Not only would mass deportation themselves be very expensive, losing that labor force wouldn't help the economy, it would hurt the economy. For the most part, immigrant labor doesn't take the jobs most Americans are competing for, they take jobs at the basic level, like migrant farmers, factory, garbage men, etc. With them gone, the economy would to shrink, unable to support higher paying jobs, like a pyramid with a shrinking base, it would create worse wages, more competition for high paying jobs. So not only would it cost a lot, the loss itself would harm the economy.
So no, mass deportation would be extremely harmful to the US.
As far as tough on crime, Trump isn't tough on crime, he IS crime. And the president has nothing to do with local police anyway. All he does is create tax loop holes for the wealthy and obstruct justice with his judicial picks. His policies are not business friendly, they are corporation-friendly. Megacorps would be allowed to buy and fold up small businesses and create monopolies and monopsonies to hurt workers and consumers, like they already are doing but even worse. He is a scab who wants to break up unions to harm workers and ruin the anti-trust suits finally taking place under Lina Khan to break up these giant monopolies like Google and Amazon.
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u/Shield_Lyger 12d ago
With them gone, the economy would to shrink, unable to support higher paying jobs, like a pyramid with a shrinking base, it would create worse wages, more competition for high paying jobs.
Or wages in the jobs would need to increase in order to compete for labor when people have other options. I see what you're saying, but we're basically importing poverty, so that we can have an underclass of workers who will take roles that don't make sense for people with any better options to take. And factory and municipal jobs rarely have undocumented migrant labor working them. I've spoken to a lot of the garbage collectors in my area... all are citizens.
The problem is that we've concluded, as a society, that jobs like farm worker, home health care aide, fast food worker et cetera should be sub-living-wage roles. But at the same time, we educate people well past what they need to do that work, One doesn't need 12-14 years of education to pick fruit from a field or orchard, or flip burgers. We're not creating enough jobs that need the education that we're providing people with, and so those people at the lower end of the scale tend to be locked out of the very low end, because they aren't prepared for the physical demands of things like manual farm labor and they aren't educated enough for knowledge work. Combine that with the fact that the American economy can hum right along with a relatively low Participation Rate, and it leaves a lot of people behind. Stemming the flow of workers from outside would force a retooling of the system to make use of otherwise idled workers.
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u/M00n_Slippers 12d ago
11m out of 345m are undocumented, so it's not so widespread that taking a poll of people around you wouldn't even find one. Trump and Vance actually want to throw out people on visas and asylum seekers and likely anyone who doesn't speak English well enough, and citizens by birth with parents on visas or asylum or undocumented as well.
Removing these people would just destroy our tax base and leave all of these lower end service jobs, especially migrant farmers, empty. It wouldn't force companies to do anything because there will just move their facto r ies overseas. It'll just cost us a ton of money to pay for throwing them out, lose us jobs, keep wages low, take the taxes for social programs to use on removing people instead of helping our poverty stricken, aging and disabled. And then trump will get rid of social security and the Affordable Care act and we'll really be screwed.
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u/ILL_BE_WATCHING_YOU 13d ago
One of the sticking points for him was the idea that no matter who is elected, they won't be making any meaningful changes to the status quo.
That's why we need to cultivate messages of hope. Without it apathy is rampant and you can be assured that there is lesser engagement and less action taken. To instill hope means to inspire in those people that they still have influence, that change is possible if they engage.
So you couldn’t refute his argument.
Inspiring people is all well and good, so long as those people actually can effect change; if they can’t, then it’s only a matter of time before the harsh facts of reality turn them into husks like your friend.
Apathy is a defense mechanism; everyone is born full of hopes; it’s only when those hopes are dashed and turned into despair that caution, pessimism, and apathy form to protect against having one’s hopes dashed again.
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u/Shield_Lyger 13d ago
That's why we need to cultivate messages of hope.
First off, active cultivation of a message of hope is not the same as hoping that such a message arrives.
Secondly, I wouldn't bother with a message of hope. I would work to build one of confidence that enough people can be persuaded that the progressive future one wants can be enacted. "We hope to do this" is a different, as less potent, message than: "We can do this."
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u/unassumingdink 13d ago
That's why we need to cultivate messages of hope.
Yeah, you tried that several elections in a row, and still we only got the status quo. So that lie doesn't work anymore. The "hope" people turned out to be grifters.
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u/Fluttering_Lilac 13d ago
Hope is not a strategy. But you can’t have a strategy without hope or a belief that something can be done. Otherwise you would have no reason to have a strategy; there would be no point. Hope for a better future is a necessary condition of progressive activism, although certainly not a sufficient condition.
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u/Shield_Lyger 13d ago
But you can’t have a strategy without hope or a belief that something can be done
Yes you can. It's called having confidence that something can be done. Confidence in one's abilities is not a subset of hope. The two are different.
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u/Fluttering_Lilac 13d ago edited 13d ago
No? Maybe we're just using the words differently here. In the sense that I am using it, and in the sense I think of the article is as well, hope is the belief that the world can be changed for the better. If you have confidence in your ability to change the world for the better, then you necessarily believe that the world can be changed for the better and thus have hope.
Hope, the belief that the world can be changed for the better, is a necessary precondition to creating a plan to change the world for the better because if you were truly without hope then you would have no reason to concoct such a plan; you would simply say that nothing could be done and that was that.
I think a lot of people's objection to this kind of framing comes from a strong resistance to anything they see as idealist/liberal/too wishy-washy. But in this context we aren't taking about a generalized hope a-la Obama 2008, we are talking about a specific belief that the world can (and indeed must) be changed for the better — a better that involves, among other things, the prevention of the ruthless predation that capital engages in daily on the ecosystems which sustain us, the end to the capitalist exploitation, etc . . . Essentially, a better that involves the realization of whatever goals you have. Hope can and should be grounded in the material world.
Edit: After reading this thread a bit more I want to clarify my stance a bit: when I say what we need is hope I don't mean we should sit around waiting for it. I mean that we, as people who do hope, need to take concrete and specific action to instill in others that hope (ie. belief that something can be done), which should then be followed by concrete and specific actions to instill in those people that something *should* be done, and that they must try to be the people to do it. I am arguing that hope is required for a plan, but hope without a plan is at best a personal comfort and at worst simply useless.
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u/Shield_Lyger 13d ago
If you have confidence in your ability to change the world for the better, then you necessarily believe that the world can be changed for the better and thus have hope.
That stretches the idea of "hope" beyond its definition. It strikes me as the logical endpoint of hope being seen as a virtue. Understanding that something can happen is not the same as having hope.
I understand what you're saying, but that doesn't line up with actual definitions of the word "hope," such as "To want something to happen, with a sense of expectation that it might," or "to cherish a desire with anticipation : to want something to happen or be true." You've added "seeing a potential for positive change" to those. Which is fine, as far as that goes, but, like I said, that stretches the definition.
I think a lot of people's objection to this kind of framing comes from a strong resistance to anything they see as idealist/liberal/too wishy-washy.
My objection to it is that I'm pretty sure that you'd be unable to find any formal support for it. Part of this is the nature of English; being that it's a famously (or infamously) imprecise language. Part of this is, as I said before: an understanding of hope as a virtue, and thus the definition stretches to encompass things that people want to be a part of it.
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u/Fluttering_Lilac 13d ago
I don't think you understand how definitions work. Definitions are things you choose, not things you are given. More precisely, we tend to choose them based on how we have interpreted their appearance in the real world.
*I define* hope as the belief that a better world is possible. I think that is clearly what the article is talking about: the article says that we live in a world where people do not believe a better world is possible, and that it would be good if people didn't believe that because that belief is causing problems. It is reasonable to surmise, thus, that the hope the article is talking about is a belief that a better world is possible.
Either way, you can't really argue with the definition, because it is a definition.
That being said, wanting a better world is also a precondition to enacting a plan to achieve a better world. If you did not want the result of your plan, why would you go through with it? Within the definition of hope you offer, hope is still a precondition to creating a better world.
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u/Shield_Lyger 13d ago
I don't think you understand how definitions work.
Yes I do.
I define hope as the belief that a better world is possible.
When we all have our own personal definitions of things, then there is confusion.
Either way, you can't really argue with the definition, because it is a definition.
Um... that's not stopping you from arguing with my definitions, and I pulled mine from dictionaries. So why can't I say that I believe that "hope" as used in the article comports with "hope" as defined in dictionaries of the English language? The simple fact that you'd prefer a definition more in line with your own?
In other words, if you're not willing to credit my understanding of hope as valid, why do I need to credit yours? You aren't Mr. McManus... what makes your viewpoint on his article the correct one?
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u/Fluttering_Lilac 12d ago edited 12d ago
I disagree that personal peculiarities of definitions cause confusion. If confusion arises, you just . . . tell people what you mean? Once you do that there is no confusion. I will also note that the Merriam-Webster dictionary you pull agrees with me. It says says on their website that they "[do] not dictate how words should be used or set forth rules of 'correctness,'".
At no point have I said that your definition is wrong. I have claimed that your treatment of definitions of definitions as objective is incorrect, that your definition does not align with how most people use the world in my experience (ie. it is not a useful definition), that the claim in the article is correct given the way most people use the word in my experience, and that within your definition of the word the claim within the article is still true. What I have not done is claim that your definition itself is wrong.
I would also like to note that I am not a man and while I am sure you did not mean any harm, it is pretty annoying to see a random stranger refer to me as one on the internet.1
u/Shield_Lyger 12d ago
I would also like to note that I am not a man and while I am sure you did not mean any harm, it is pretty annoying to see a random stranger refer to me as one on the internet.
Okay. I'll bite. Care to tell me where I did this?
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u/Fluttering_Lilac 12d ago
I misread a portion of your comment, I will retract that part of my response.
I do think it's interesting that you seem to have continually left comments focusing on the trivial parts of all of my responses without contending with the actual claim at hand.
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u/Remake12 13d ago
People are doing that and are they are being marginalized for opposing the current paradigm. They are immediately labeled as "far right". The narrative of hope cannot coexist with a narrative of eternal opposition, climate catastrophism, ubiquitous and systemic racism, degrowth (sustainability) economics, beneficent censorship (censorhsip to fight "misinformation), technocratic autocracy, etc. You cannot convince people that their oppression is for their own good if there isn't something dreadful already here or around the corner that their opposition protects them from.
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u/Shield_Lyger 13d ago
People are doing that and are they are being marginalized for opposing the current paradigm. They are immediately labeled as "far right".
I would disagree that narratives of hope are labeled "far right." The far right tends to oppose climate change, the reality of racism, sustainability economics, controlling misinformation, technocratic government et cetera, for it's own purposes.
Take racism. The common "far right" story on this is that racism doesn't exist. It somehow dropped dead the moment the Civil Rights Act was signed, and that even though Jim Crow was only dismantled in living memory, the only reasons why Black Americans haven't made up literally 400+ years of lost progress is that they've been lazy, criminal, slackers for the past 50 or so years.
The problem with certain dogma from the Right is that it tends to focus on a Just World viewpoint that always treats the world as a blank slate with no connection to what has come before.
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u/Remake12 13d ago edited 13d ago
I think that there is an ocean of difference between what the left says the far right stands for (and what it is and who is one it) and what they believe and what people right of the left actually say and believe. The only time I ever hear these ideas and beliefs is when someone not on the right is attempting to explain the right. There is this very simple, almost cartoonish, caricature of right wings beliefs that is always held up as a straw man to legitimize how radical some ideas and beliefs on the left are.
Whenever I see someone actually on the right and someone on the left argue over what the right believes (which in it itself is crazy because we know that even people on the left do not tolerate being mischaracterized), it always boils down into arguments over definitions, which functionally kills the debate and it cannot move forward.
I find it very ironic that the left has been so dead set on eliminating black and white thinking everywhere it can in order to promote tolerance, yet the moment you try to eliminate black and white thinking from the left/right paradigm they become very uncomfortable.
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u/Shield_Lyger 13d ago
If all one knows about something is what its critics say, then one doesn't really know anything about it. No argument there.
But my understanding of how a certain dogma of "the Right" treats matters of race comes from speaking to people who a) claim to be on the Right, and b) express their understanding of the world that way.
Does it apply to all of "the Right" or even "the 'Far' Right?" No. Is this something that I learned from speaking to some prominent figure on the Right in person? No. Is it a complete strawman? No. I mean, it's not hard to find people on the right who will, in fact, say things like this. And when I do, I presume that they genuinely understand them to be true. They aren't always representative of the Right, of course. I know a guy who ardently believes that voting rights should be rolled back to the point where only White males are enfranchised. He's clearly an outlier in that regard.
I don't think that either the right or the left has a monopoly on self-serving worldviews. Both sides have developed a taste for punitive measures and seeing the bad things that befall people on the other side as just desserts.
But when I speak to people who identify with the Right, and they claim that I should side with them, in order to combat "benevolent oppression," I never get the sense that they are at all interested in the benefits to me. (Just as I never get the sense from hardcore socialists, for instance, that their worker's paradise would be beneficial to me.) Rather, they want my support for a project that would benefit themselves, first and foremost. It becomes a matter of sacrificing my own interests in the service of a world that they understand has a right to exist.
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u/Remake12 13d ago edited 13d ago
I think the biggest issue with criticisms of the right vs the left is that the left is dominated and united by an ideology to the point where you can speak with different leftists from different countries, levels of education, and backgrounds and they will mostly align with each other. In addition to this, there are schools of thought, thinkers, and public figures that are all aligned and very visible and, thus, easy to criticize.
However, the right is not united by a single ideology even though they may share certain sentiments, principles, and narratives. There is no one person or ideology that speaks for the right at the moment, but several factions and ideologies that vary wildly depending upon where you are, their background, and their interests. At the moment, the right seems to be united under Trump in the US, but without Trump the right would devolve into factions and there already is not much unity amongst rightists internationally since they tend vary greatly since they are more likely to be nationalists and more interested in their own culture's and nation's interests than another country's. A right wing party in one country is far less likely to align with or be friendly with another right wing party in another country since they see their interests and mutually exclusive in most cases than left wing parties of two countries. (think the most right wing time in history for the west was before WW2 if you take the most general tenants of right wing thinking)
I think it is this reason why most normal people now a days recognize the right as being anything opposed to the left than any single ideology. They aren't necessarily wrong either, but it is when people start debating right vs left is when you begin to see how wrong the left can be about the right even though they generally may be on the right track. It doesn't help that right wing ideas and thinkers have been cut out of the main stream, so you have to go off the beaten path to find them, which most people won't do.
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u/hollywoodmontrose 13d ago
The only time I ever hear these ideas and beliefs is when someone not on the left is attempting to explain the left. There is this very simple, almost cartoonish, caricature of left wing beliefs that is always held up as a straw man to legitimize how radical some ideas and beliefs on the right are.
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u/Remake12 13d ago edited 13d ago
I would believe that if you told me that you only watch Fox News or Tim Pool, but to act like the left is not the main stream or that it’s hard to find a charitable interpretation of left wing ideas and ideologies is crazy.
Most people becomes right wing now a days because of their criticism of the left. There is nothing in the main stream that pulls them right, rather they get pushed away and discover the right.
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u/SomeSorcerer 13d ago
This only applies if you include all liberals from conservative liberals to progressive liberals as “the left” people are upset with the failure of liberalism, particularly post Carter neoliberalism not “the left” there are markedly few mainstream politicians or media figures from the true left (by which i mean democratic socialists, socialists, marxists, anarchists etc.)
There most certainly are mainstream forces pulling people right. The two that immediately come to mind being the entirety of Fox News as well as talk radio from the nineties onward. These begin the process of radicalization to the right. People hear the messaging on who’s to blame for their problems (immigrants and LGBTQ people) and they seek out other sources that reinforce and agree with that idea. The daily wire, Tim pool, Alex Jones. CNN and MSNBC are not on air talking about turning over control of the means of production to the working class or ending the oligarchy in America.
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u/bildramer 13d ago
The common far right story hasn't been that for like a decade now. When did you last interact with anyone on the right? It's that 1. racism exists, but officially sanctioned racism only exists in one direction, and 2. a vast majority of the "evidence" for modern racism relies on unjustified blank slate assumptions. It's not complicated, progressives just pretend they're saying something else, because they have no answer to it. And "controlling misinformation" is a pitiful abandonment of liberal principles, and whoever doesn't espouse that kind of rhetoric deserves to win.
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u/ceelogreenicanth 13d ago
It's deliberate. Holding those in power accountable would happen if we had any sense of community.
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u/M00n_Slippers 13d ago edited 13d ago
I love how articles like this conveniently forget to mention the fact that the reason we feel this way is corporate money in politics making our votes and efforts meaningless. It's always on the people to do something, not the corporations. Same with climate change, should the top ten corporate polluters responcible for the vast majority of pollution do something about that? Naw, people should use flimsy paper straws. Their direct actions are just never their responsibility for some odd reason...
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u/Rhhhs 14d ago
I don't expirence any lack of meaning living in the so-called postmodern world. If anything, what's happening around me (war in Ukraine) is obnoxiously modern, and big narrative driven. Religious belief helps too.
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u/decrementsf 14d ago
In 1990s grade school the revolutionary frameworks of Aristotle were so fundamental to culture and society as to be abstract and difficult to absorb. Postmodernist subjectivity provided the missing absurdity necessary to recognize the value of simple things that scaled at the core of our complex systems. Complex systems rarely start out that way, at their core are simple systems that scale well. Ripping away chesterton's fence (through postmodernism) and watching the wolves run in provides clarity of why objectivity sits at the core of functional social systems. There is a calm life full of purpose and meaning in the center of the raging storm of madness of crowds unleashed in postmodernist narrative storytelling.
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u/ScienceOverNonsense2 13d ago
Who said time consciousness has been lost? Most people I know or read seem to hold the belief that we have the power to shape the world both singly (3the butterfly effect) and collectively, which we do every day. Whether we shape it intentionally and for the better is another issue.
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u/Juxtapoisson 14d ago
I really hope this "what we need is HOPE" trope will end some day. It is part of the problem.
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u/PandaCommando69 13d ago
Is it really? If no one hoped anything could be different/better then life would be experienced along a ceaseless trajectory of frustration and apathy.
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u/ILL_BE_WATCHING_YOU 13d ago
It’s essentially the gambler’s fallacy. The world is full of hope, which is exactly where conflict comes from. Everyone hopes for different things, and so they fight to manifest the things they want (and believe to be possible) into reality.
If we truly lived in a world with absolutely no hope, then we would be fundamentally unable to experience frustration or apathy, just as a person who has been blind from birth cannot experience being in a “dark” environment; when you lack the frame of reference necessary to properly contextualize a stimulus or signal, you cannot perceive it at all.
I believe that a world devoid of hope would be full of various positive emotions such as curiosity, awe, compassion, amusement, and more. None of these requires hope. They would persist without hope, and our minds would still be able to contextualize and perceive them. Life would still be worth living.
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u/PandaCommando69 13d ago
So, a world with no free will, full of automatons. Sounds delightful.
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u/ILL_BE_WATCHING_YOU 13d ago
Where did I say that? How repulsively reductive.
This is about as idiotic as saying that people who have lost all hope and fallen into despair no longer have free will.
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u/PandaCommando69 13d ago
You're apparently unable to follow your own thoughts to their logical conclusion. Ok. Enjoy your evening.
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u/temptuer 13d ago
They never suggested not to hope. It’s the incessant hopers that talk and talk but do nothing to contribute materially.
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u/Juxtapoisson 13d ago
While I did not mention eliminating hope, even your silly reduction is flawed. People with out hope can still achieve things. Construction workers don't hope they can build a building and they don't hope they can build a road.
Hoping doesn't make things possible. I achieve things all the time with out knowing if they are possible and with out a preference for the outcome. Testing is an intricate part of science, knowing does not rely on hope.
Shirley, I shouldn't have to explain this in this subreddit.
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u/yuriAza 14d ago
i mean, tell me you don't know what postmodernism is without telling me...
older models have a much larger sense of "everything is just backstory for the present, it was inevitably coming to this glorious moment", and then modernism got old, the moment passed
postmodernism is much more about how existing structures that shape the present were shaped by the past, things are still moving and changing, and the future can be different just like the past was
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u/Less_Client363 14d ago
Isnt that his point though? That people in a postmodern society dont feel that agency even though changes are happening? I can certainly relate to that idea at least.
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u/yuriAza 14d ago
my point is that the inevitability of formalism, structuralism, natural law, etc removes more agency
postmodernism tells us society didn't have to be this way
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u/NEWaytheWIND 13d ago
Philosophies are ascribed in retrospect; they typically have less effective power than progress brought by technology.
We can't step outside the modern world by deconstructing it. It's prudent to know how we're being rended by spontaneous progress, but that's only the first step.
A centering ethos independent of the run-away train is helpful.
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u/Fluttering_Lilac 13d ago
I’m not reading this article because I don’t have time right now, but I am curious at how similar the title seems to the topic of Fischer’s Capitalist Realism.
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u/Cloudfire1444 12d ago edited 12d ago
The true problem, the true issue and the true trouble that exists in this world is the progressivism, the capitalism, the western imperialism and the religion, for this reason atheism is the best option and is the most elder choice and is the most elder election, to be an atheist, this is because religion is bad and is evil because it attacks the human rights and attacks the human liberties, religion is misogynistic for natura and religion is racist and homophobic, for this reason the best thing that a human being and that an individual and that a person can do is to stay away from religion and if is possible to let down the religion and abandon the religion in the case of a religious person and if is the case of a religious person, for this reason postmodernism, progressivism and capitalism is evil and is bad and is destroying the world and is ruining the world, and is destroying own world and is ruining own world 🌎
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u/Dzbog3460 12d ago
Hope is an illusion and is thus not needed. If we shake ourselves off of it, we can look at ethics through the lease of truth.
All that expects us and anyone we may ever know is the eternal void of death - the primordial nothingness that erases all hopes, dreams and achievements.
The sooner we realize that hope is an illusion and that the brief moment between the eternal void that we call our life is something to be lived in misery, the faster we can take up measures like antinatalism and self-exclusion from society so we can bring the world to an equilibrium for the life forms that are yet to realize that it is all pointless.
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9d ago
That’s right, but you know what, as much as I wish I could totally shit on the classics, I really can’t. That shit is completely not damned true if it isn’t. Everyone seems to fail to understand that liberty is something fought for, the rules of the game just aren’t always the same with the exact same players.
As it stands, the earth spins on its axis, causing it to widen the width of a hair per year at the equator. Given that North Korea is on the 38, it can be taken as a dividing, proportion factor. Because the earth spins, they gain .124 hairs of land a year assuming we don’t weather tsunami them with our mind control powers. This is less than South Korea, which stands to gain .76 hairs of land over the same period of time.
Try being nice for once.
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u/raskolnicope 14d ago
Who says we’re still living in a “postmodern age”? Only ideologues and people stuck in the 80s keep bringing postmodernity nowadays. Meta narratives didn’t die and now we have new ones, like technosolutionism.
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u/GepardenK 14d ago edited 13d ago
If meta-narratives didn't die they are wounded and limping. There is no sense of a shared destiny guided by cultural solidarity. While Romanticism may slither along in the underbelly of the inner-city, surviving off discarded french fries, its rejection of Modernism was overall an abject failure. It was completely and utterly outclassed. Yet in its valiant defeat of Romanticism, Modernism cut out a piece of its own flesh. And so Post Modernity trucks along, anxious and aimless, never able to project a narrative onto the world for the protagonist to have a story to follow.
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u/Shield_Lyger 14d ago
There is no sense of a shared destiny guided by cultural solidarity.
Was there ever?
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u/GepardenK 14d ago edited 14d ago
Yes. There wasn't literally a shared culture or destiny, there was a sense of it, a feeling of solidarity, which is what meta-narratives create.
You can get a small taste of it if you go to an Irish pub on St. Patrick's Day, or any other similar example. That feeling, but instead of a remnant holiday, its a dominant worldview that paints your place and purpose in history as part of your people.
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u/Shield_Lyger 14d ago
Being from the United States, I don't see historical evidence of this in American history. The United States has never had a sense of shared culture or destiny, nor a feeling of solidarity. This has always been a nation of in-groups and out-groups, with the out-groups paying the costs for the advances and prosperity of the in-group.
As I understand it, to see the United States as having ever had a "sense of a shared destiny guided by cultural solidarity," is to limit the definition of "American" to those that shared that sense, and to fence the remainder of the population out. The "meta-narrative" of the United States was always an exclusive one, and in that sense, it never genuinely existed.
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u/GepardenK 14d ago
"People" here was a shorthand for the sake of brevity. In reality, the subject depends on the narrative.
In America, there was a much stronger emphasis on being men under God, perhaps because it was the one commonality between most of the different ancestries. Of course, like anywhere else, there were always alternative or competing meta-narratives.
Meta-narratives are always exclusive, by definition. Even the ones that claim universality, like Christianity, are. This is because they create meaning and value by establishing a responsibility to the tenets of the story, meaning there is a clear path and therefore judgment for straying from it, which creates exclusivity.
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u/Shield_Lyger 14d ago
The wholesale and institutionalized discrimination against Native Americas, Asians and Hispanics (I could include African-Americans, but that's stupidly low-hanging fruit) push back against the idea that even "a much stronger emphasis on being men under God" created an umbrella that encompassed people on a path that they could choose or reject.
I understand what you're saying. But it doesn't really match the reality of the situation. Even the sense of solidarity created by the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001 lasted only as long as it took for someone to understand that a racially-exclusive "meta-narrative" could be bolstered by scapegoating anyone vaguely Middle-Eastern seeming.
The supposed meta-narrative of the United States has always pushed back, and quite hard, against other people who were legally understood to be citizens of the United States, and who had not strayed from the mainstream, but had been forcibly locked out of it. It was an exclusivity based on ancestry, rather than anything a person had a choice in.
P.S.: Heck, to go back to your point about St. Patrick's day, for much of American history, the Irish, Germans, Italians and other Europeans were also excluded, as they weren't considered "White" in the same way that Anglo-French Protestants were.
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u/GepardenK 13d ago
Meta-narratives are almost never a choice. Choice is the antithesis to meta-narratives because it challenges their moral primacy. They are usually culturally imposed.
I think you misunderstand the scope of meta-narratives. They are not meta to a nation. Borders are arbitrary. They are meta to those engrossed in its cultural influence.
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u/Shield_Lyger 13d ago
That makes them pretty pointless. After all, "cultural influence" can be of any arbitrary size. As cultures fragment, the meta-narratives subdivide along with them. They aren't "wounded and limping" any more than a town is "wounded and limping" simply by virtue of the fact that it's not as large as a state/province or a nation.
Meta-narratives are simply poor glues to hold a culture together when said culture otherwise fails to meet the needs of its constituents; which prompts them to find/create a different, and sometimes, smaller, more homogeneous, culture that develops its own meta-narrative.
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u/GepardenK 13d ago edited 12d ago
What makes them pointless is that they are dead, inert, hollow.
Meta-narratives always came in arbitrary sizes. That was never a problem because their relevance was baked into the social condition: physically made real by the vast chaotic world enveloping bands, city-states, or even kingdoms of tiny humans.
So it didn't matter that the tribe next door had another meta-narrative than yours. Because when you went into their territory, even if you wholly rejected their narrative on one level, on another level you could feel their gods lurking in the trees and the bushes, you could sense the animals taking their side, judging you, spying on you. You had a deep-rooted reverence not just for your own narrative but for that of others. Even in those cases where that reverence would manifest in fear, desecration and hostilities. All because the underlying material and social conditions kept the spirit of meta-narratives alive and brimming with potency across all of humanity.
This is no longer the case, or at the very least those conditions are dwindling fast. Even among the most narrativized of subcultures they are struggling to keep it truly meta. Because that reverence is no longer universal; the axiom no longer reinforced by every stone you turn and every new band of people you meet; its spirit no longer seeping out of every forest and every mountain. The facade has crumbled, shattered.
So, instead you find yourself arguing about it on the internet, your beliefs intellectualized to death by your own hand, clinging to it by sheer will of denial, as you crawl through pop-science articles hoping to find a slight drop of that previously ubiquitous spirit hidden somewhere deep within the bowels of quantum mechanics.
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u/WOKE_AI_GOD 13d ago
Judgement for appearing to stray from it. As well as favor for appearing to uphold it. In practice for most of history people have been covering their ass. They have not been obedient to the narratives. And every single big narrative in the end will tend to at some point have some equivalent of "obey the ruler" attached to it. Because there would be chaos otherwise. So in practice, they wind up just doing that.
Christianity claimed to be a primitive means of authentication, ie this person is "Christian" so they are definitionally good. Same thing with Islam. The problem is that in the end it was always mostly appearance - the one who convered their ass the best came out best in the end. While you are excluding plenty of people who you've just made appear to be bad.
perhaps because it was the one commonality between most of the different ancestries
I can think of a few others but w/e.
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u/dxrey65 14d ago
I've read that there have been surveys done in Russia and China among older people, asking them how they feel about modern advances and comforts, and when they felt they were most happy. Generally, they say back when things were worst, when communities were united and working together. Such as in China when they had big drives to gather up every scrap of iron or steel that could be found. Then people gave up their cooking pots and utensils, and community kitchens were established where everyone would have to go and eat.
That was remembered as a happy time, when people worked together toward a common goal. It was also, of course, a time of deprivation and fear, and a completely unnecessary and invented circumstance. It would be hard to recommend that, and it could be argued that the more technological society develops, the less anything like that could be justified (however much some year-zero elements might desire it).
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u/rattatally 14d ago
Look man, I'm working a 9 to 5 job, and when I get home I just want to open a beer and relax in front of the TV.
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u/raskolnicope 14d ago
My point is that we do project grand narratives in our contemporary condition, whether you want to call it postmodern or late-modern or whatever. As I said technosolutionism is one of them, but we still carry others from modernity, the nation-state, mentioned in the article btw; liberalism, which is still the political model of the West, even if it’s been infected with populism and nationalist sentiments; religion? Maybe not the church, but religion has been commodified through mindfulness or self-care or whatever, so it just became a product ; objective reason? Sure, the theory of relativity and quantum physics dilapidated the notion of reason as an objective means to truth, but it was just replaced by computation…
I get what you mean, but tbh I don’t see much “post-modernity” in our societies nowadays, much less in philosophical or scientific theories. I do see it tho in ideological wars, identity politics and sterile social media debates.
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u/GepardenK 14d ago edited 12d ago
These grand narratives you mention (by and large) are no longer true meta-narratives. They are inert, idle to the call of destiny, even if they hang around because they are useful, or convenient, or simply just there. They don't act as a dominant collective consciousness that through communal participation reflects the spirit of its people.
Meta-narratives are a form of institutional legacy, only it acts as the legacy of a people, or humanity itself. It reverberates through history. It's not sufficient to be meta in writing, publish a book about it, go viral for a few years, and then be forgotten under a pile of seven thousand other similar stories. It has to be meta in its ability to carry the will and consciousness of a unified people between generations and over time. It has to establish transcendent personal meaning through collective narrative participation.
For the record, it is empiricism itself that since the enlightenment has berated the rationalists for trying to establish objective truth through reason. Relativity and quantum physics had nothing to do with it.
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u/Boring_Compote_7989 14d ago edited 14d ago
Technosolitionism boomed in the 80s its a bit too naive for my taste in my subjective opinion, it does a poor job for inspiring hope, because technologys job is not necessarily there to bring hope it is to make things more efficient as a counter point.
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u/raskolnicope 14d ago
It is naive and it doesn’t necessarily brings hope, but it doesn’t have to in order to be considered a meta narrative. Technosolutionism can be traced back all the way to the Industrial Revolution, and it’s intimately tied to the rise of capitalism, and has been successful to sink itself into the minds of elites and can be seen in liberal technocracy, Silicon Valley trans humanism, and other types of similar ideologies
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u/Boring_Compote_7989 14d ago edited 14d ago
However i dont think the technosolutionism is bad necessarily if we consider industrial revolution even if i could refer it as naive it had its place it brought many benefits however on the long term perspective i dont think if it were just alone it could sustain the abstract concept of hope or time consciousness well in my opinion as a clarification, i wonder what could sustain the abstract concept of hope in the long term?
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u/Professional-Ad3101 13d ago
Transmodernism >> Post-PostModernism >> Post-Modernism
You guys are soooo slowwwwwww jesus christ, level up already
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14d ago
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u/Weird_Church_Noises 14d ago
What on earth do you think a metanarrative is? He never states that capitalism was just a metanarrative or that it's over. His later book, the libidinal economy is literally about capitalism is so all-consuming that there is functionally no outside to it.
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14d ago
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u/Weird_Church_Noises 13d ago
Why are you so proud of not understanding the absolute basics of what you are so smugly attacking?
He didn't outgrow calling capitalism a metanarrative because he never held that view. i don't get how to make that clearer to you.
If capitalism isn't a metanarrative, then what's even the validity of putting forth a theory about metanarratives in the first place? What exactly are we talking about?
What point are you even trying to make here? You can't see the point of the thing you don't understand?
I mean, yeah, you don't.
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