Postmodernism's Assault On Western Culture

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Postmodernism's Assault On Western Culture
http://members.optushome.com.au/jimball/Postmodernism.html
Giles Auty
Quadrant June 2000

IT IS WIDELY BELIEVED that as we grow older we tend to look back on
earlier times in a spirit of generally unjustified nostalgia. Yet let
us suppose for a moment that life really was qualitatively better in
certain vital and readily identifiable ways thirty, forty or even
fifty years ago. Why has it become so impossible for us to admit this?
The Prime Minister, John Howard, was widely reviled recently when he
suggested that Australia was possibly a better place to live in the
past. Foreseeably, Phillip Adams was quick to point out that
Australians were less prosperous and also more apparently intolerant
thirty years ago, so how could they possibly have been happier?

Since I have been living and working in Australia for only five years
you may not think I am qualified to comment on this subject at all.
But I would maintain that countries become strong and virtuous or weak
and confused for much the same reasons wherever they are. The basic
factors affecting humanity are much more universal than many people
care to suppose.

I have been a cultural commentator now for about twenty-five years. I
first came to Australia in 1994 to deliver a lecture entitled “The
Meaning of Modern” at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. With a title
like that it was a wonder that anyone at all turned up, but since I
spoke to a full auditorium I concluded that perhaps many knew me
already from my writings in the British weekly the Spectator. I wrote
every week in that journal from 1984 to 1995, when I took up my
present appointment as national art correspondent for the Australian.

During my eleven years with the Spectator the theme to which I
returned most often was the fundamental ways in which the phenomenon I
described as the “rhetoric of radicalism” affects modern cultures. The
rhetoric of radicalism is one of the most potent forces in society
today, yet is essentially anti-intellectual. Perhaps its most damaging
effect is the way it manages to sell the idea that ill-conceived and
destructive initiatives are automatic examples of progress, and all
who resist or obstruct them are reactionaries, conservatives or worse.
The rhetoric of radicalism permeates so much of contemporary thought
that many people have become inured to its essential intellectual
dishonesty.

In fact, much of the rhetoric of radicalism can be traced back to a
small number of lies and distortions, many of which have largely
become hidden from view by the verbiage which has been constructed
upon the framework of their basic fallacies.

I am reminded here of Jonathan Swift’s famous flea:

So, naturalists observe, a flea Hath smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller fleas to bite ‘em
And so proceed ad infinitum. In art and culture in general, a whole
superstructure can soon be built up on the back of a first,
fundamental fallacy—rather like some giant inverted pyramid. The
trick, from a progressivist point of view, is to get the first fallacy
past the public’s guard while it is not paying proper attention, in
order that the superstructure can later be built upon it. The seminal
lie of radicalism is that all change is automatically for the better,
even though much of our experience of life teaches us otherwise. It
was on the basis of this simple lie that self-styled radicals were
first able to seize and retain the moral high ground—and to pour hot
oil from there on any doubters or dissenters below “If you disagree
with us you are obstructing progress,” the radical yells, hoping
nobody spots the basic flaw in this statement. For who among us is
qualified to decide what constitutes progress? Naturally, self-styled
progressives claim such decision-making as their exclusive
prerogative.

That is why senseless, destructive and otherwise ill-conceived
initiatives continue to be sprung on us—in education especially—in the
confident and generally justified belief that few will dare to oppose
them. After all, who wants to be called a reactionary; a Luddite or a
fascist? What makes moral cowards of so many is nothing more than a
cultural confidence trick. This is not to say that genuine,
professional risks do not exist for those who resist self-styled
progressivist fashions. In certain fields such as education and the
arts those who speak out against radical excess often pay for such
candour with their jobs.

How did Western society allow itself to tumble into such an
intellectually dishonest morass? The answer as in so many other cases,
has been a general lack of vigilance and vision or will to safeguard
our freedoms. By contrast, most of those who have been swept along by
cultural fashions and catchphrases fail to foresee the likely
consequences of their actions. Frequently they are too young to do so
and, lacking knowledge of other political systems—an almost universal
problem for young Australians—have no idea of the value of the system
they are attempting to destroy. Coupled with this, our current
cultural controllers are not always keen to own up to what their
hidden agenda may be. Thus the true weight thrown behind supposedly
progressivist art forms, say, is often cleverly concealed from us.
This was one of the points I made in the first talk I gave in
Australia, on “the meaning of modern”.

So here is a question to ask yourselves. Some hundreds of hugely
prestigious and influential museums of modern art and modern
collections exist in the world. But what exactly does modern mean in
such a context? Two definitions are offered by most dictionaries for
this much-used adjective: “of the present or recent times” and
“new-fashioned, not antiquated”. While the first meaning refers simply
to time, the second has to do with style and attitude. So is a major
museum of modern art simply a repository for the best national and
international art created in a given time span—say the past 100
years—irrespective of that art’s styles and attitudes? Or does the
word modem refer here largely to the novelty of the art’s style and
character? If, as I believe, museums of modern art are effective
showcases for avant-gardist styles, where can we go to see the best
non-avant-gardist art of the period?

The truth is that not a single publicly funded museum anywhere is
devoted to such a purpose. In visual art, the rhetoric of radicalism
holds total sway and we have been persuaded somehow to make novelty
almost the sole effective index of quality. In fact, in art, the
fundamental fallacy that change is automatically superior to
continuity lies like a dead weight at the heart of our official
cultures. It will certainly take some shifting.
However, as we can discover by examining all sorts of other areas of
human activity, even cursorily, no guarantee truly exists anywhere
that newer means better. By foolishly assuming that it does we are, in
fact, at least as likely to regress culturally as to create any
genuine advance.

Wherever a choice exists between radical and continuous traditions,
this should be decided purely on its merits. Regrettably, the empty
and intellectually dishonest rhetoric of radicalism usually intervenes
here to ensure this does not happen. In a society in which the
description “conservative” has become an automatic adjective of abuse,
we are increasingly unlikely to conserve even those customs and
practices which are of essential value to us. Indeed, the vital
qualities necessary for human fulfilment are as likely as any to be
sacrificed in a non-stop Gradin rush to achieve some new landmark of
unnatural behaviour. Most of us know in our hearts that this is
happening yet seem increasingly unable to prevent it.

EVEN BY the distant 1950s, the adjective modern had probably become
the most used—and abused—epithet in any advertiser’s armoury.
Admonitions to modernise our homes and to discard our old possessions
and habits filled almost every magazine, billboard and newspaper.

Since then, however, there has been a long series of reactions, as
many people turned away from using modern convenience foods, say, or
buying man-made fibres, to quote just two examples. They have turned
increasingly to preparing their own food and to sleeping in the kind
of linen or fine cotton sheets our great-grandparents might have
recognised. More modern did not automatically mean better in these or
umpteen other instances after all.

Why, then, have we been so slow to apply this lesson to more crucial
areas of our lives, such as culture? Are modern morals and manners
really likely to prove better in the long run than their traditional
forerunners? While we may all know what traditional courtesy is, we
live now in an age where modern courtesy has probably become a
contradiction in terms.

So far I have talked largely about modernism rather than its mutant
offspring, postmodernism. Yet, in a sense, modernist excess and
reliance on rhetoric rather than argument to render such excess
acceptable helped pave the way for postmodernism. For one thing,
modernism helped reveal how complacent and disorganised a lot of
traditionalist thinking had become. The revolutionaries of 1968 could
hardly avoid seeing the Western liberal democracies of the time as
ripe for the plucking. Thankfully, the baying of slogans still remains
insufficient to bring most modern Western governments to their knees.

The unfortunate inhabitants of China were not so lucky, of course, the
Red Guards of the time bringing murder, misery and mayhem to millions.
The would-be Red Guards of the West ran into more serious obstacles in
trying to wreck the democratic institutions they had targeted. People
in the West had fought too long and too hard for their freedoms—and
many had also witnessed at first hand the disagreeable realities of
the Marxist systems which prevailed elsewhere.

But the Marxist-inspired revolutionary initiatives of the late 1960s
did not simply go away. Driven by the teachings of influential figures
such as the Italian Antonio Gramsci, the would-be subversives in our
midst next targeted those more vulnerable areas of Western life which
form the soft underbellies of our nations: education and the arts. If
these could be subverted successfully from within, corrosion might
soon succeed where political confrontation seemed likely to fail.
Political programs which would not stand a prayer at the polls thus
simply by-passed the inadequate defence mechanisms of democracy and
achieved a choke-hold on our cultures instead. I do not think the
communist parties in Australia or Britain ever polled even one per
cent of the vote n general elections; yet Marxist ideas control much
of tour contemporary education and culture. Centrist and
right-of-centre governments in general have been too slow in
identifying or reacting to this threat and now have a more or less
intractable problem on their hands.

Observers like me, who once saw the excesses of late modernism as
representing a major threat to Western Cultures could hardly have
reckoned with the virulence of its postmodernist successor. To deal
with postmodernism is like struggling with a Hydra—and one which
constantly mutates. Among the Hydra’s heads we might begin with
deconstruction, post-colonialism, revisionist history, gender theory,
political correctness, multiculturalism and feminism. All share one
basic characteristic, in taking their flavour from neo-Marxist theory,
which may be identified clearly from a continuing passion for
simplistic groupings, explanations and Would-be solutions. Content no
longer with communism versus capitalism nor the proletariat versus the
bourgeoisie we are now exhorted to believe that the true solution to
all of modern society’s ills lies in warfare between men and women,
blacks and whites, homosexuals and straights. An even more
traditional, polarised antagonism—evil versus good—has been relegated
to the sidelines as a kind of laughable anachronism. By its very age,
the conflict between good and evil can be dismissed as irrelevant to
contemporary problems. Instead, white heterosexual men are to blame
for more or less everything—more especially so if they are British.
The only worse-regarded group in Australia is probably the
conservative theologians.

BACK IN THE 1970s, some of the earliest manifestations of political
correctness seemed so silly that intelligent people were more inclined
to ignore or laugh at them than bother to answer their allegations. In
the event, the folly was probably ours for failing to foresee how
inexorably political correctness and related movements would grow in
stridency if not in moral force. Perhaps we were guilty of the same
strain of shortsightedness as the French aristocrats who foolishly
ignored the vengeful women who would soon spend their days knitting
away happily at the foot of the guillotine. In postmodern. times, we
ignore any example at all of apparent communal madness at our peril.
Next week could see it incorporated into a new by-law passed by North
Sydney or some other similarly militant council. Unwarranted
interference in our lives is no longer confined to culture, of course,
but can occur anywhere.

What at least some aspects of political correctness have done is to
enfranchise the talentless, the resentful, and the shouters of
slogans. Such folk aim to inherit what remains of our earth as rapidly
as possible. Nor will there be any room in their world for even the
most reasoned forms of dissent. I fear the land of the fair go may
shortly be far gone unless we all wake up very rapidly.

It is not as though we have been short of warnings from excellent
sources about the true nature of post-modernism. Typically, the fact
that the distinguished American academic and art critic Roger Kimball
was speaking in Melbourne about a year ago was not widely reported.
Anyone who has not yet read Kimball’s book Tenured Radicals should
right that omission straight away. Kimball was writing
about the United States, but parallels with Australian practice are
far from difficult to find. Here is Kimball on

Marxist teaching:

In good Marxist fashion, culture is denied autonomy and is reduced to
being a coefficient of something else: class relations, sexual
oppression, racial exploitation etc. Questions of artistic quality are
systematically replaced with tests for political relevance, even as
the whole realm of aesthetic experience is “demythologised” as an
insidious bourgeois fiction designed to consolidate the cultural
hegemony of the ruling class. The thought that there might be
something uniquely valuable about culture taken on its own terms, that
literature, for example, might have its own criteria of achievement
and offer its own distinctive satisfactions that are independent of
contemporary political battles-none of this seems to matter or indeed
to be seriously considered by our multiculturalist radicals.

Far from demythologising anything, Marxist education-.1 radicals are
in fact often creators themselves of a series of malignant myths. This
is hardly surprising, since communist political regimes as a whole
always depended heavily on lies, propaganda and the suppression of
truth. However except in a few cases, even these inhuman measures
failed to save them.

When I was living in England, a popular cultural joke was that,
following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the last genuine communist
cells were to be found in Beverly Hills, the BBC and the staffrooms of
any Western university. Marx remains the true puppet-master behind
almost all postmodernist initiatives, including the growing antagonism
and contempt for Christianity and organised religion of all kinds.

Basic Christian codes once underpinned society and the law in most
Western countries. Sometimes these codes could seem sanctimonious, but
much of the fabric of Western society once depended heavily on the
cement they provided. When I was a boy, theft was very rare in rural
England even though many people did not bother to lock their doors. I
gather the same was true of Australia. I believe this was at least
partly because a kind of secularised Christian code still prevailed.
Certainly Christian fortitude was a major factor in helping Western
families survive both the Second World War and the process of
rebuilding during the 1950s.

However, the 1960s saw a marked dilution of such sterling virtues, as
improving prosperity led not to gratitude but to increasingly mindless
hedonism. Until the 1960s, drugs were used by only a minute minority
in Britain. Today in most Western countries three quarters of all
urban crime is connected to drugs. Next time your car or house is
ransacked or you are held up at knife point, do please offer a hymn of
thanks to the sixties.

Pornography of all kinds also proliferated following the sixties. In
its wake has followed the ready availability of hideous, ritualised
violence in films, videos and toys even for the very young. That this
was the kind of thing the future might hold would not have entered
even the worst nightmares of most citizens in the fifties.

So was John Howard’s nostalgia for earlier decades unwarranted? Since
the advent of postmodernism almost every worthwhile certainty and
traditional virtue has not just been called into question but has come
under increasing assault—usually in our centres of further education
and supposed enlightenment. When the concepts of truth, honour,
objectivity, altruism, justice and religious faith are treated with
contempt or scepticism by those who instruct our young, is it any
great wonder that some of the young should seek refuge in oblivion or
narcolepsy?

Not surprisingly, those in the arts and education who are so keen to
destroy Western democracy have nothing worthwhile to recommend in its
place. Who, in their right minds, could have been sold the old myths
of communism that the events of 1989 finally exposed once and for all?
Perhaps what our would-be cultural commissars envisage is a kind of
existential void, punctuated by further tightening of politically
correct thumbscrews? They have wasted no time in replacing the
commandments Moses brought down from the mountain with man-made
inventions, such as Thou shalt not smile at nor otherwise flirt with
members of the opposite sex in the street or in the workplace, even
though in many countries the continuation of the human race has
depended largely upon such manoeuvres.

But what about other main planks of postmodernist practice? Perhaps
the most insidious of these has been the entirely negative, and
largely self-defeating, quasi-academic process known as
deconstruction. Deconstruction wilfully fails to see language as an
excellent and poetic tool of communication and one in which the
listener, also, can play a positive role by trying to perceive meaning
even through veils of incoherence. The latter role will be a
thoroughly familiar one to psychoanalysts, priests, pedagogues and
parents. Deconstruction, which has helped wreck both the teaching of
English and the joyful appreciation of literature, is a negative
pseudoscience with no positive end-product. But if you feel I am being
over-harsh about the subject, this is what the estimable English
philosopher

Roger Scruton, in An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modem Culture, has
to say about it:
What deconstruction sets before us is a profound mystery, which can be
approached only through the incantation of invented words, through a
Newspeak which deconstructs. its own meaning in the act of utterance.
When at last the veil is lifted, we perceive a wondrous landscape: a
world of negations, a world in which, wherever we look for presence we
find absence, a world not of people but of vacant idols, offers, in
the places where we seek for order, friendship and moral value, only
the skeleton of power. There is no creation in this world, though it
is full of cleverness—a cleverness actively depl6yed in the cause of
Nothing. It is a world of uncreation, without hope or faith or love,
since no “text" could possibly mean those transcendental things. It is
a world in which negation has been endowed with the supreme
instruments—power and intellect—so making absence into the
all-embracing presence. It is, in short, the world of the Devil.

MOST ORDINARY PEOPLE remain as confused to this day about what
postmodernism is as they do about its aims and origin. They are merely
aware that a great number of things with which they disagree totally
are slowly changing their lives.

So what is postmodernism? One easy answer is that it is radical
relativism gone rampant. But the answer I prefer is that it represents
an attempt to usher in a new kind of left-wing totalitarianism via
the unlocked back doors of democracies. Postmodernism represents the
neo-Marxist conquest of Western cultures by stealth. The profession of
journalism in which I work is one of the last outposts of artistic
thinking in which independent ideas may still be tolerated.

Determinists like to believe that what we think of as our independent
and individual beings are mere products of social and environmental
forces: the era and particular circumstances in which we grew up and
were educated, for instance. But I do not believe in the inevitability
of the consequences of such social processes at all. A number of
people undoubtedly exist whose backgrounds are very similar to mine
but with whom I do not share a single opinion. Fed roughly the same
stimuli, we have somehow reached diametrically opposed views. The
determining factor here—or so I believe—lies largely in our
propensities to accept or reject fashionable theories. Thus people
must exist somewhere who are entirely comfortable with the claim made
by our national broadcaster that it is “your ABC”, whereas to me the
fact that anyone should make such a claim ought to make us suspicious
in itself. In fact, the real meaning of the slogan is clearly, “It’s
our ABC. If you don’t like what we do, take a running jump.”

One of the most valuable responses any human being can develop is an
instinct for plausibility. Note I do not use the word truth here in
case there are tender, postmodernist sensibilities among us.
Postmodernists claim that no such thing exists as truth in the
singular. Indeed, in occasional moments of despair at the state of the
world, I soothe myself by imagining conversations which might take
place in post-modernist households: “Cathy and Andrew, we would like
you to say who broke your little brother’s space rocket. We want you
to tell the truths.”

--
JimB
http://www.geocities.com/UAM01
Union Against Multi-Culty

"Time to string up the traitors in our midst"