The Impasse Between Modernism and Postmodernism

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Quillette


Published on December 7, 2017     written by Patrick Lee Miller

Buying textbooks, writing syllabi, and putting on armor. This is how many students and teachers prepared to return to campus this past fall. The last few years have witnessed an intensifying war for the soul of the university, with many minor skirmishes, and several pitched battles. The most dramatic was last spring at Evergreen State, shortly before the end of the spring semester.1 Perhaps the most dramatic since then have been at Reed College and Wilfrid Laurier University.2There is no shortage of examples, filling periodicals left and right. Wherever it next explodes, this war promises more ferocity, causing more casualties—careers, programs, ideals.
What’s at stake? According to Michael Aaron, writing after the battle at Evergreen, the campus war is symptomatic of a broader clash of three worldviews contesting the future of our culture: traditionalism, modernism, and postmodernism.3 The traditionalists, he writes, “do not like the direction in which modernity is headed, and so are looking to go back to an earlier time when they believe society was better.” Whether they oppose changes to sexual mores or American demographics, Aaron adds, “these folks include typical status-quo conservatives, Evangelical Christians as well as more nefarious types such as white nationalists and the ‘alt right’.” In his estimation, they are done.
He concedes that the election of Trump has empowered them, but he believes “they have largely been pushed to the fringes in terms of their social influence.” A few hours in front of FoxNews, or browsing the massive comment threads of some PragerU videos, would disabuse him of this illusion. Traditionalists are veryinfluential in the national culture of the U.S.A, if not other countries, and hopeful predictions of their retreat have all proven false. But Aaron is correct, in a way. When these traditionalists talk about the future, they suspend their intellects, projecting onto it the past—and more often than not, an imaginary version of the past.4 Make America Great … again?
Aaron is right, then, if by “social influence” he means the society of the academy, where many of the intelligent, informed, and innovative conversations about the future occur. With a few notable exceptions—Robert George of Princeton, for instance—traditionalists of that sort are marginal to these conversations. Nationally, most of them are speaking to each other, preferring the training camp to the front lines. Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option (2017) openly summons them to this withdrawal. “It is between the modernists and postmodernists,” Aaron rightly claims, “where the future of society is being fought,” and the battlefield is indeed the university. How, then, does he characterize these two opponents?

“Postmodernists,” he says, “eschew any notion of objectivity, perceiving knowledge as a construct of power differentials.” That’s as good a short summary as any, and Aaron adduces plenty of examples to show how this philosophical attitude ripples through the beliefs and behavior of people who may never have read Foucault, Derrida, or Lyotard. Focusing on “the Weinstein/Evergreen State affair,” he argues that it “poses a significant crossroads to modern society, extending well beyond the conflict occurring on campus.” Weinstein’s well-reasoned letter against the Day of Presence could have been debated rationally, on its objective merits, in the manner of modernism. Instead, it was treated as a racist incident, an exertion of white power, a move in the postmodern game of knowledge construction.
Just because postmodernism corrupts a university in this way, however, the vindication of modernism does not follow. That would follow only if two conditions were satisfied: if the three options Aaron states are really the only ones, and the other two (traditionalism and postmodernism) have been soundly eliminated. Let us assume that traditionalism of the sort Aaron describes has indeed been soundly eliminated. Let us also assume that postmodernism as a viable ideology for a functioning university has also been soundly eliminated. Isn’t that enough to satisfy those two conditions and render Aaron’s argument sound? In a word, no....
Continue here: http://quillette.com/2017/12/07/impasse-modernism-postmodernism/

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