The ‘Postmodern’ Intellectual Roots of Today’s Campus Mobs
If reality is nothing but a ‘narrative,’ then of course it’s important to control what people say.
Wall Street Journal, March 24, 2017 6:24 p.m. ET
We are witnessing the second great era of speech repression in academia, the first coming during the “culture wars” of the late 1980s and early ’90s. One force behind the new wave is a theory of truth, or a picture of reality, developed the first time around. This theory, which we might call “linguistic constructivism,” holds that we don’t merely describe or represent the world in language; language creates the world and ourselves. A favorite slogan of our moment, “Words have power,” reflects that view.
Back in the day, “postmodern” intellectual figures such as my teacher Richard Rorty were accused of relativism. In his 1998 book, “Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America,” Rorty wrote that “objectivity is a matter of intersubjective consensus among human beings, not of accurate representation of something nonhuman.” He had many ways of deflecting the charge of relativism. But perhaps it is more notable that his “consensus reality” was to be achieved through telling stories. He held that reality was a matter of widely accepted narratives—in particularly narratives of social progress.
The idea that we construct ourselves and one another and the world by language was remarkably pervasive in the golden period of postmodernism. Figures such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Paul Ricoeur and Nelson Goodman—who disagreed about many things—converged on this. “If I ask about the world,” wrote Goodman, a Harvard philosopher, “you can offer to tell me how it is under one or more frames of reference; but if I insist that you tell me how it is apart from all frames, what can you say? We are confined to ways of describing whatever is described. Our universe, so to speak, consists of these ways rather than of a world.”
The idea originated in high theory, but it proved to have a remarkable ability to percolate into the wider culture. Before the end of the ’90s, Nike was using the slogan “We are the stories we tell.” In politics and advertising, “strategic communications” turned to questions about how to remake people’s consciousness—for example by “reframing,” as suggested by Goodman. Therapists helped their patients make their stories more positive.
That words have such power suggests that we can create a better world by re-narrating. But it also implies that we need to get control of what people say and write and hear and read. If words make reality, then they are central to racial oppression, for example. Changing the words we use about race could change consciousness and ameliorate racism. Many feminists and critical race theorists have taken up this kind of linguistic constructionism, and it often seems to young people, including my students, to be a common-sense truth.
That is a remarkable development, for this sort of postmodernism was greeted as radical and bizarre when it arrived. Here is one reason to question it: After the ’60s civil-rights movement, white Americans by and large learned not to use racist language. We became convinced that racism was to a significant extent a matter of using the wrong terms. We edited these terms out of our public discourse and even out of our consciousness. Then we more or less came to believe that we were no longer racists.
But in many ways, the structure of racist oppression persisted or even in some cases intensified, as in mass incarceration. Fixing the language, by formal and informal social sanctions on one another, turned out to be much easier than addressing material conditions of segregation or poverty. A position like Rorty’s, however, permits no criterion of truth outside the language, no appeal to the “material conditions” beyond our descriptions.
For Rorty, truth is nothing but a story we will all come to accept together—a progressive story in which inequalities of race, sex and sexuality are being steadily ameliorated. The positions articulated by opponents of this narrative are false by definition, false from the outset, known to be false before they are even examined. It is then well within the values of academia—devoted to the truth—to silence those views.
“It is doubtful whether the current critics of the universities who are called ‘conservative intellectuals’ deserve this description,” Rorty writes. “For intellectuals are supposed to be aware of, and speak to, issues of social justice.” That is, opponents of the leftist consensus in academia do not even count as intellectuals because of the positions they take. By that logic it is defensible to eliminate such people from graduate programs, to deny them tenure, even to shout them down.
Many strands run into today’s academic censoriousness; this one comes from the arena of ideas rather than directly from larger social forces. But it has been a particularly potent ideology in establishing academia as a zone of ideological unanimity.
Mr. Sartwell is an associate professor of philosophy at Dickinson College. His book “Entanglements: a System of Philosophy” is set to appear this month from SUNY Press.
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