It’s long overdue to seriously address the decline of nearly everything, excepting processor power and societal incoherence. Near the core of the issue is postmodernism, a huge subject to be sure. Though undeniably fashionable, obscurantism and flippancy play into the hands of the postmodern worldview, and to some extent I’ve been guilty of them myself, though I’m trying to atone.
Beyond the pompousness and deliberate obfuscation of ideas and methods, and despite all its Marxist posturing, the postmodern worldview is fundamentally antisocial, because it engenders solipsism and fragmentation rather than coherence and solidarity. To claim the end of truth is deeply antisocial because it forecloses the possibility of rational responses to climate change and other pressing catastrophes. I accuse postmodernists of playing directly into the hands of neoliberal capitalists. The reflexive individualism and relentless disruption are right out of Baudrillard.
But perhaps it’s worse than that. The early postmodernists may arguably have been idealists—though even then I question their motives—but postmodernism has become a crass race to the bottom, much like the object of its critique. The goal has become to show how little sense and effort you can make and still be taken seriously. The less sense you make, and the less work you do, the more laudable you are. But this is not only a recipe for ghastly, superficial and pointless art, it’s also the ideal condition for further incoherence and dehumanization.
The essential lie of postmodernism is that nothing is truer or more relevant than anything else; that all views are fundamentally and radically equal, except for the view that everything is equal, which is implicitly elevated to religious dogma. In its most extreme formulation, the dogma of postmodern equality reduces all hierarchies to slavery, so that claiming or citing authority brands you as a colonialist, regardless of the merits of your argument. The indispensable condiment of postmodern discourse is blur, because the mash-up of unsupported and contradictory assertions can only be made remotely plausible by encrypting its content.
The way out of the postmodern quagmire is by resorting to meaningful, evidence-based distinctions. Such distinctions will inevitably be accused of bias, inequality, inequity, and many related ills, but this is part of the lie that needs challenging. Above all it’s the notion that "everything is everything"—a willfully ill-informed misapplication of quantum theory—that needs refutation. “Everything is mostly nothing” would more accurately describe the quantum scale, but it’s still a fatally misleading and nihilistic view of the human predicament. For anti-postmodern rebels, I propose a more constructive slogan: “Reality is real enough to kill us all.”
