Springtime for
snowflakes, Part Deux
Before I continue talking about Michael Rectenwald’s Springtime for Snowflakes, I want to lay
out what postmodernism is. While Rectenwald does a good job of tracing out this
pseudo philosophy (and you can look at Stephen Hicks’s work for an equally
fabulous job of taking apart postmodernism starting with Rousseau and the
German counter-Enlightenment), let’s take a look at it on a more mundane level.
To do this work, let’s begin with the concept of the metanarrative.
A metanarrative is a broad explanation of how the world works. Metanarratives
include economics, religion, science, philosophy, and, to some degree,
politics. Quite simply, the postmodernists don’t believe that any of these
metanarratives contain any truth. There is no truth, only perspective,
identity, and power. A perspective becomes dominant not because it contains any
truth but because its adherents have the power to silence or destroy those
proposing alternatives.
While I could talk about Foucault and the other French
postmodernists, one of the easiest ways to show a postmodern attack is to look
at one of the literary grand-daddies of postmodernism in the United States.
Long before Quentin Tarantino gave us Pulp
Fiction, Joseph Heller launched a scathing attack against metanarratives in
Catch-22.
If you will recall, Heller creates an absurd world in which
the bombardier Yossarian is trying to stay alive when everybody’s trying to
kill him. Is he paranoid? Not really.
The Germans are shooting at him. And his own officers, Colonels Korn and
Cathcart, are in fact constantly increasing the number of missions Yossarian
has to fly. Thus, given the high death rates of American aircrews in World War
II, the good colonels are effectively sentencing Yossarian to death.
In this very funny and very dark novel, Heller takes down
all of the metanarratives. Religion—in the person of Chaplain Tapman—is
completely ineffective. Politics is corrupt. The Action Board finds Clevenger
guilty of anything it wants to find him guilty of. Science serves only to
create killing machines such as machine guns and bombers. Medicine is totally
corrupt. Doc Daneka cares ultimately only about making money. And, finally, the
science of economics is, dare I say it, bankrupt. Milo Minderbinder starts a
worldwide syndicate and even contracts with the Germans to bomb his own
airfield because, as Milo argues, at least the Germans pay their bills on time.
Except for individual perspectives and agendas, there’s no
truth in Catch-22.
Or is there?
Well, while Heller relentlessly attacks the metanarratives
of our time, he does drop his clown mask for just one line in the entire novel.
Yossarian argues that the war is already won. If that’s the case, he’s done his
part, and why should he die for a done deal? Another character, Major Danby, is
sympathetic to Yossarian but does say that World War II isn’t World War I (a
bunch of imperialist countries slugging it out) and that if the Germans did win,
they would make lampshades out of both Danby and Yossarian.
This moment of truth, and it is truth, might not seem
significant, but in it Heller is being honest: there was a difference between
the Americans and the Germans. The Americans didn’t commit genocide. By being
honest, Heller for a moment drops his postmodern conceit and admits that there
is truth. Genocide is morally wrong no matter how much power you have.
And therein lies the problem with postmodernism, the central
problem: if there is no truth, then there is no objective standard of right and
wrong. And, ultimately, everything, as both Dostoyevsky and Albert Camus
realized, is permitted. The path of postmodern thought leads to killing fields
and death camps.
In postmodernism, all standards of respect for the
individual are provisional and can shift with the needs of those in power and
perhaps even with one’s own feelings.
This lack of right and wrong is the problem with
postmodernism and its step child, Social Justice Warrior culture. As Rectenwald
notes, Antifa takes the law into its own hands. Silence people? Why not? Burn
them out? Why not? Beat them with pipes? Why not?
In Antifa’s world, if you disagree with someone and think
they’re vile, then they have no rights and deserve whatever you decide they
deserve.
This is very, very dangerous territory.
On a more mundane level, transgenderism argues that there’s
no biological truth. Our bodies simply get in the way of who we really are. My
Ph.D. is from the University of Minnesota, where the Center for Sexual Health,
under the direction of Eli Coleman, has been a factory promoting transgender
studies. It’s ironic that in an age in which people are turned down for kidney
transplants by their insurance companies, sexual reassignment surgery and
hormone treatments are now routinely covered.
There seems to my mind to be something very wrong here.
Oops, I said “wrong.” How traditional and bad of me.
Rectenwald, who has drawn massive fire from NYU Liberal
Studies professors, has done us all a service in critiquing postmodernism and
SJW culture.
One of the few things I find curious about Rectenwald’s book
and his disavowal of postmodernism is not the disavowal, but the fact that it
took him a while to come to this point. He seemed to be genuinely intrigued by
parts of postmodernism in graduate school.
I think that there a couple of reasons why this is the case.
Part of this issue stems from Rectenwald’s background and approach to graduate
school. In Springtime, Rectenwald
says that he never had any real political activist experience. Most of my
classmates in graduate school were similar. At the age of 18, right after high
school, I worked as a door-to-door fundraiser for Pennsylvania Public Interest
Coalition. I asked people for money. I solicited voter registrations. I
canvassed on issues ranging from the bottle bill to Pennsylvania utility
reform. During college, I also canvassed for Nader’s Raiders (the PIRGs) and
Greenpeace. In graduate school, I did a little bit of fundraising for
Cleanwater Action and even, on the phones, for Michael Harrington’s group,
Democratic Socialists of America.
Thus, from the beginning of graduate school, I recognized
that there was a huge difference between real political action (which involves
outreach, lobbying, and money) and the Frankfurt School and postmodern glop
that I was served up in my Ph.D. program. While I found the writings of a few
Frankfurt School thinkers (Adorno, for example) interesting, they weren’t
really that important to me. I think Marcuse did serve up a pretty good
critique of society in One Dimensional
Man, but beyond that, I was never really seduced by theory. I could speak
it and did in seminar papers and articles. But I saw theory as just a technical
language I had to learn to speak if I wanted publication. I went to graduate school
because I liked literature and a few critical writers, such as Paul Fussell. So
many of my classmates seemed to have wanted graduate school to give them
a way of looking at the world. I already had that. I wasn’t looking for
anything else. Rectenwald might have been. If so, he got far more than he bargained
on.
I never saw theory as really connected to American politics.
And I’ve known a fair number of people who have either run or worked for the
Democratic Party. Most of these people really are concerned with getting concrete
legislation passed. With none of these people-- including a woman who tried to
take Allan Grayson’s seat in Florida two years ago—did I ever talk about
Foucault. With Millennials who have been through graduate programs in the
humanities and soft social sciences starting to run for office, there probably
is more of an awareness of critical theory.
When I was in graduate school, I served as a paid mentor for
six first-year graduate students. In our first meeting, I said, “Welcome to
English, where bad ideas come to die.” When one of my charges asked me what I
meant, I said, can you think of another discipline in which Freud and Marx are
taken seriously? Psychology abandoned Freud decades ago. And most economists
don’t take Marx at all seriously. But welcome to the humanities, where really
bad ideas really are taken seriously.
In showing us that postmodernism and social justice warrior
culture are absurd at best and dangerous at worst, Rectenwald has told the
truth. And in this postmodern age, that truth telling is more important than
ever.
BEST B.ED ONLINE ADMISSION FORM BY KAPOOR STUDY CIRCLE JAMMU UNIVERSITY B.ED ADMISSION ONLINE REGISTRATION, CRSU B.ED ADMISSION, MDU B.ED ONLINE ADMISSION<, B.ED COURSE DURATION, B.ED ONLINE ADMISSION 2019.
ReplyDeleteB.ED COURSE DURATION
MDU B.ED ONLINE ADMISSION
CRSU B.ED ADMISSION
JAMMU UNIVERSITY B.ED ADMISSION ONLINE REGISTRATION
B.ED ONLINE ADMISSION 2019
B.ED ADMISSION COLLAGE DELHI
IGNOU B.ED ADMISSION
B.ED COURSE DURATION
B.ED ADMISSION COLLAGE IN DELHI