Richard Wolin (from The Seduction of Unreason):
Today the postmodern juggernaut seems to have run aground. Outside of the parochial climate of contemporary academe, its program of a “farewell to reason” failed to take root. Its bold proclamation concerning the end of “metanarratives” of human emancipation also failed to gain widespread acceptance. Moreover, the eastern European dissidents whose words and actions inspired the “revolutions of 1989” successfully relied on the discourse of “human rights” to undermine totalitarianism. In this way, a political orientation predicated on the values of Western humanism that the cultural left had denigrated as a tool of American hegemony made a meaningful comeback.
During the 1980s and 1990s the academic left attempted to replace the discourse of democratic legitimacy with the avowedly anti-universalistic concept of “identity politics.” But this approach was fraught with contradictions and difficulties. Identity politics—the anti-politics of cultural self-affirmation—seemed plausible and attractive among polities where basic constitutional and legal guarantees remained firmly in place. Such provisions secured a political space—a “magic wall” of governmental noninterference, so to speak—in which the parameters of cultural identity could be safely explored in ways that stopped short of riding roughshod over competing identity claims. Yet where such assurances were lacking—the cases of Bosnia, Rwanda, and Algeria immediately leap to mind—identity politics engendered unspeakable tragedy.
These experiences affirm one of the central precepts of political modernity: the formal guarantees of procedural democracy remain an indispensable prerequisite for the values of toleration and mutual recognition to flourish. Or, to express this insight in the idiom of contemporary political theory, such experiences confirm the priority of the “right” over the “good.” In retrospect, postmodernism’s contention, most pointedly expressed in Michel Foucault’s work, that the institutionalization of “reason” and “progress” leads to enhanced domination rather than emancipation seems overtly cynical and empirically untenable. The “Third Wave” of democratization that swept across eastern Europe, South America, and (more tentatively) Asia during the 1980s and 1990s has demonstrated that the legacy of democratic humanism harbors considerable staying power. Conversely, principled enmity toward democratic values can easily lead to disastrous political outcomes.
The current disaffection with postmodernism is in no small measure attributable to recent political circumstances. Humanism’s return spells postmodernism’s demise. Totalitarianism was the twentieth century’s defining political experience. Its aftermath has left us with a new categorical imperative: no more Auschwitzes or Gulags. We now know that an ineffaceable difference separates democratic and totalitarian regimes. Despite their manifest empirical failings, democratic polities possess a capacity for internal political change that totalitarian societies do not. A discourse such as postmodernism that celebrates the virtues of cultural relativism and that remains ambivalent, at best, vis-à-vis democratic norms is inadequate to the moral and political demands of the contemporary hour.
Whereas, historically, fascism flirted with the values of a strong state, postmodernist political thought leans toward a philosophical anarchism. As a rule, it views almost all political institutions—democratic ones included—with endemic suspicion. From a practical standpoint, this attitude has meant an adieu to real-world politics in favor of airy and speculative discussions of “the political.” At a certain point postmodernism’s hostility towards “reason” and “truth” is intellectually untenable and politically debilitating. Often its mistrust of logic and argumentation are so extreme that its practitioners are left dazed and disoriented—morally and politically defenseless.
When, in keeping with the practice of a neo-Nietzschean “hermeneutic of suspicion,” reason and democracy are reduced to objects of mistrust, one invites political impotence: one risks surrendering the capacity for effective action in the world. Esoteric theorizing—theory tailored to an audience of initiates and acolytes—threatens to become an ersatz praxis and an end in itself. As a result, the postmodern left risks depriving democracy of valuable normative resources at an hour of extreme historical need. In times of crisis, that the elements of a “democratic minimum” be preserved is imperative. Postmodern political thought, which devalues coalition building and consensus in favor of identity politics and political agonistics, prematurely discounts this heritage. It thereby inherits one of the most problematic traits of “leftism”: the cynical assumption that democratic norms are little more than a veil for vested interests. Of course, they can and do serve such purposes, but they also offer a crucial element of ethical leverage by means of which dominant interests may be exposed and transformed. The political gains that have been registered during the last three decades by previously marginalized social groups (women, gays, ethnic minorities) testify to a logic of political inclusion. They demonstrate capacities for progressive political change that remain lodged in democratic precepts and institutions. To surrender entirely these potentials means abandoning progressive politics altogether.
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Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason (Princeton University Press, 2003)
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