Wednesday September 15, 2004

Who’s Postmodern Now?

I was struck by this observation from a recent book review in the New Statesman:

We inherit the idea of the intellectual from the 18th-century Enlightenment, which valued truth, universality and objectivity — all highly suspect notions in a postmodern age. As Furedi points out, these ideas used to be savaged by the political right, as they undercut appeals to prejudice, hierarchy and custom. Nowadays, in a choice historical irony, they are under assault from the cultural left.

More important than the context here is the fact that this neatly summarizes the accepted storyline about relativism, yet highlights how wrong that storyline is when it comes to the strategies being used by the political right today. The so-called culture wars — as they are usually understood — are a battle between liberal perspectivalism and conservative absolutism, and this might be true in academia, but in the culture at large, who has benefited more from the steady demolition of the popular belief in objective truth? Well, let’s see, it’s probably the party that has managed to turn the absence of WMD and a complete lack of evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida or 9/11 into matters of opinion.

Ever since Rush Limbaugh took to the airwaves a decade ago, the right has hammered away at the public’s belief in objective truth by embracing a thorough-going relativism that would make even Foucault blush. With the myth of the liberal media — and there might be a liberal media somewhere, but it’s not in the papers put out by Gannett and Knight-Ridder and Scripps-Howard that most Americans read — the right has trained the public to always consider the source when it comes to views that oppose it. Think the war is going badly? So says the New York Times. Think Bush has the worst record on job creation since Herbert Hoover? Ah, the lefties at the Washington Post are just out to get him.

The result, judging from opinion polls at least, is that the right has become practically bullet-proof, as a majority of Americans discard undisputed facts as if they were the idiosyncratic customs of some mysterious jungle tribe. And, as many have already pointed out, the media has largely acquiesced to this perspectival interpretation of reality by dutifully collecting dissenting opinions, even when they are in conflict with demonstrable facts. There can be no doubt that if the upcoming election were decided, not by television pageants and ad hominem attacks, but by a bare presention of the administration’s record, it wouldn’t even be close. Fact: Iraq did not have WMD. Fact: Iraq had no connection to al-Qaida or 9/11.

Yet the right continues to speak of the threat posed by Iraq, the Republican Party parades 9/11 as if Iraq had something to do with it, and Dick Cheney cryptically accepts the 9/11 Commission’s conclusion that there was no “collaborative relationship” between Iraq and al-Qaida yet objects to “media reports suggesting that al-Qaida and Iraq had no ties whatsoever” — as if the facts in evidence were merely interpretations of facts. Well, hello, Richard Rorty.

But this is nothing new. As the quote above suggests, it is really quite old. For just as the values of truth and objectivity “used to be savaged by the political right, as they undercut appeals to prejudice, hierarchy and custom,” so are they being savaged today.

Posted by jim at 07:18 AM ||