Author: Ophelia Benson

Strange anti-anti-‘postmodernism’ is cropping up everywhere today. (Okay three places that I’ve seen. That’s postmodernist for ‘everywhere.’) The scare-quotes on postmodernism are because the postmodernism in question seems in every case to be some kind of weird ragbag or catch-all term that is so elastic it means pretty much nothing, or anything, or just ‘whatever I feel like making it mean for the purposes of this particular sentence or this particular non-argument.’ But the fact that the word is being used as a ragbag doesn’t mean it doesn’t function as a sower of suspicion of dastardly enemies of (unspecified and very very blurry) postmodernism. (The word is also being used, confusingly, to mean ‘various forms of skepticism and critical scrutiny that have been around for twenty or thirty centuries at least but that I, because I haven’t read very widely, think are all the invention of something called postmodernism.’)

Iain Macwhirter on Stephen Law’s new book for instance.

Now, postmodernists and structuralists might say that Law is naive and reductionist and that he fails to recognise the social context of morality. It’s all very well laying down absolutes, but you have to take into account people’s different viewpoints…Law is impatient with all this. “Postmodernists accuse me of authoritarian conservatism; that as a white male I shouldn’t be telling people how to live. But I don’t have a lot of time for that.” Perhaps he should find the time, because as an author of popular philosophy he can’t ignore the most influential strand of modern philosophy in British universities. “Structuralism” doesn’t even appear in Law’s index, and there is no discussion of the popes of postmodernism, such as Louis Althusser or Michel Foucault.

But part of the reason ‘postmodernism’ is ‘influential,’ if it is (which depends for one thing on how it’s defined, and for instance whether or not one considers Althusser a postmodernist), is for the same sort of reason the head of the MCB is ‘influential,’ which is that newspapers like the Telegraph keep calling him influential. This business of being influential is very much a self-fulfilling prophecy – very ‘constructed,’ in fact, in good postmodernist (according to some ragbaggy definitions) fashion. And the more newspapers and journalists keep repeating that one ‘can’t ignore’ postmodernism because it is influential, the more influential it will become, thus making it even more mandatory that one not ignore it, in a tightening spiral of influence and mandatoricity and thou shalt not ignoreism, all quite independent of any merit inhering in postmodernism itself. And is Althusser really a pope of postmodernism?

Then there’s Marc Mulholland, commenting on the utter inanity of a Florida law barring the teaching of ‘revisionist’ history.

This is outrageous. Historical knowledge is approached by the interplay of evidence, scholarly protocols, and veracious argument. The state has no useful function to play in determining academic procedures. This seems rather to confirm my long standing concerns regarding the obscurantist uses the mundanities of militantly anti PoMo can be put to use.

But know-nothing fits about ‘revisionist’ history in the US have no need of postmodernism. Such fits have been going on for decades, and they don’t necessarily have anything to do with putative postmodernism at all. They simply boil down to ‘any interpretation of history that I don’t like.’ Again, one needs a terribly ragbaggy, capacious, sagging, world-size definition of postmodernism to make it central to this issue. One also, perhaps, needs to adopt this irritating and uninformed idea that putative postmodernism invented every single skeptical or critical thought anyone ever had in order to think it is central to this issue. One, postmodernism has no monopoly on either skepticism or critical thought, and two, postmodernism often abjures and even reviles critical thought rather than recommending and embracing and making use of it. Norm has a comment here; I saw the post via his.

And there is the (very interesting, I must say) discussion at Inside Higher Ed, where the ‘postmodernism thought of everything and without it we’d all be credulous robots’ line keeps coming back, along with a repetitive insistence that people who defend the idea of truth don’t mean truth but Truth or Absolute Truth or certain truth. No matter how many times I say ‘no, just truth,’ the capital letters and transcendent adjectives keep returning. Like the repressed.

One of [Foucault’s] mind blowing and truly innovative arguments centers on the creation of homosexuality as a social category. Foucault contends that the articulation of homosexuals as a distinct and scientifically identifiable group occurred in the late 19th century; “homosexuals” were “created” in 1870s. This doesn’t challenge the “truth” of same-sex attraction or its pre-1870s history. BUT, it suggests that the scientific way of understanding same-sex eros is history-bound and culture-bound. The sexologists in the late 19th century didn’t suddenly just “get it right” by turning sexuality into an object of scientific inquiry. As I see it, that’s the “post” of the “postmodern” part; after reading Foucault, we don’t have to slavishly buy into a modernist/scientific reading of sexuality – a reading that’s likely to be reductionist, determinist, essentialist, and some other bad word.

As if (as ‘we’re all scientists now’ points out) we would have had to before reading Foucault. Sometimes (often) one wants to stop arguing with self-declared postmodernists and just urge them to read more widely. A lot more widely.

Excuse me a moment.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

gasp

Hahahahahahahahahahahahaaaaaaaaa.

Oh, christ. That’s a good one. Dylan Evans – remember him? – has ever such a good idea. He’s going oop north with his cat to live in the mud, no I mean he’s going oop north with his cat to set up Utopia. And a very nice Utopia it does sound.

He has banned TV and mobile phones, but sanctioned the internet (because he believes that the web could re-knit itself after a disaster). Medicines are fine (“this is play-acting, not religious cult”), and if the community collectively decides to import other conveniences, that’s OK too…Evans will be converting a barn (on farmland belonging to a friend) for communal living, erecting yurts, and installing toilets and solar-powered showers. He has already visited eco-villages, ashrams and monasteries to see how other “intentional communities” operate…“Our wild, or primary, nature, which has been stunted by the way we live today, is much more trustworthy than we think. And it flourishes brilliantly in our natural habitat. Look at the way hunter-gatherers make decisions, punish transgressors and counter dominant people — they know how to put people in their place. I want to explore whether those social mechanisms will work.”

Can’t you just not wait to stay away from that? I sure can! Dylan Evans is a funny, funny guy. I’ve said it all along. JS said he was sane once upon a time, but that was clearly a good long while ago.

“I began to think: could the same thing happen to our industrialised civilisation? So far, hundreds of civilisations have collapsed — why do we think ours is immune? And what would life be like in the aftermath? It suddenly struck me that such a collapse might not actually be a bad thing. It would be terrible while it happened because millions of people would die, which is obviously horrible, but those who survive might have the best chance of creating Utopia that we’ve ever had. I realised that if I was going to explore this issue, I’d have to act it out.”

Oh dear. Shame about the millions. Terrible, terrible; dear oh dear. Now – now that that’s out of the way; god damn, mama, what fun! We get to create Utopia! Yurts! Internet! No tv! Pizza! No hamburgers! Dishwashers! No stoves! Everything just perfect how I like it, with lots of this and none of that, according to my preference, oh boy oh boy oh boy, I can’t wait.

Hahahahahahaha.

I’ve been known to disagree with Giles Fraser (when he tries to tell us Christianity is naturally opposed to slavery, for instance), but he’s right this time.

“We are told that in England it is a crime to spank children,” writes Debbi Pearl from No Greater Joy Ministries, following a row that has erupted over the distribution of their literature in the UK. “Therefore Christians are not able to openly obey God in regard to biblical chastisement. They are in danger of having the state steal their children.”

See, that’s why people like me get so hostile to religion. One reason anyway – but probably the biggest one. Because it is (of its nature, and cannot help being) so useful to people who want to use it to justify and protect their desire to do nasty things. Because the central claim there is not corrigible or negotiable or subject to discussion or thought, so there is just no way to teach or persuade people who believe that claim that it is mistaken. With other kinds of claim it is possible, however difficult and challenging that may be. But with unarguable religious claims, it isn’t. So if people are convinced God wants them to hit their children with a stick, they are not going to listen to people who try to tell them they’re wrong. If people are convinced God wants them to write books defending the practice of hitting children with sticks, the same applies. If people are convinced God wants them to blow people up in wholesale lots, same applies. It’s no good.

Chastening begins early. “For the under-one-year-old, a little, 10- to 12-inch long, willowy branch (stripped of any knots that might break the skin) about one-eighth inch diameter is sufficient,” writes Michael Pearl. With older children he advises: “After a short explanation about bad attitudes and the need to love, patiently and calmly apply the rod to his backside. Somehow, after eight or 10 licks, the poison is transformed into gushing love and contentment. The world becomes a beautiful place. A brand-new child emerges. It makes an adult stare at the rod in wonder, trying to see what magic is contained therein.”

Hmm. I might have to read this book.

For, as evangelicals, the Pearls believe that salvation only comes through punishment and pain. God punishes his Son with crucifixion so that humanity might not have to face the Father’s anger. This image of God the father, for whom violence is an expression of tough love, is lodged deep in the evangelical imagination. And it twists a religion of forgiveness and compassion into something dark and cruel.

Well – they could turn that back around on you, Vic. Frankly. Because Christianity is only partly a religion of forgiveness and compassion. This is that slavery thing again; you’re reading selectively. There is plenty of very cruel, cold, vindictive stuff in the New Testament, including in the Gospels, including in the speeches of Jesus.

But, needless to say, I agree with your basic point all the same. This is nightmare stuff.

According to Ted Tripp, in his monstrous bestseller Shepherding a Child’s Heart, even babies who struggle while having their nappy changed are deemed to be rebellious and need punishment. Last month Lynn Paddock of North Carolina was charged with the murder of her four-year-old son, Sean. She had apparently beaten him with a length of quarter-inch plumbing line – plastic tubing. Like many in her church, Paddock had turned to the Pearls’ resources on Biblical parenting. The Pearls say chastisement with plumbing line is “a real attention getter”. Sean Paddock’s autopsy describes layers of bruises stretching from his bottom to his shoulder.

Theocracy’s got to go.

This seems like a bizarre reason for being angry:

Washington was angered by Mr Malloch Brown’s references to middle America, and the influence upon it of conservative commentators such as Mr Limbaugh. Mr Bolton said the speech demonstrated a “condescending, patronising tone about the American people. Fundamentally and very sadly, this was a criticism of the American people, not the American government, by an international civil servant. It’s just illegitimate.”

Did it? Was it?

“Much of the public discourse that reaches the US heartland has been largely abandoned to its loudest detractors, such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News,” Mr Malloch Brown said in a speech in New York on Tuesday. Depending on the UN while tolerating “too much unchecked UN-bashing and stereotyping” was “simply not sustainable”, he said. “You will lose the UN one way or another.”

If the Guardian is reporting what Mr Malloch Brown said accurately, then what Mr Bolton said looks like yet another instance of sloppy reading (or hearing). Yet another instance of translating X into Y and then railing at the speaker for saying Y. If that quotation and paraphrase is accurate, Malloch Brown wasn’t criticising the American people, he was criticising the Bush administration’s failure to defend the UN against people like Limbaugh. That’s a different thing. But…of course the folksy pseudo-populist schtick is way popular with the Bush admin, because it mostly works. There is simply no bottom to the weirdness of Bush successfully pretending to be a reglar fella merely via presentation of self, but there’s no denying it’s worked. This looks like another entry in that continent-size dossier.