Postmodernity as a Return to Tradition

Why Jordan Peterson is Right to Fear Postmodernism

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Our article How to Destroy Universalism has ruffled quite a few feathers. Not only is this clear from the view count, but from the fact that it is still getting response articles weeks later. Many of these have been quite poor, mostly non-sequiturs such as the claim that rejecting universalism implies rejecting objectivity,¹ or that “anyone who says that there are no truths is telling you not to believe him”.

But happily, some of the responses have been thoughtful, such as A Response to Imperium Press by Scattered Roses. This was one of the responses where the author truly understood our article and where it fits within the philosophical tradition. It is well done and we encourage you to read it in full. However the article seemed to imply that our folkish apologetics were a repetition of postmodernism, which has been a common refrain about our article.

There is certainly something to this. We have spoken at length elsewhere on postmodernism, and we devoted a Kulture Dads episode to the topic. The folkishness that we have been developing is the latest in a counter-revolutionary movement going back half a millennium, of which postmodernism is one development. We are not going to rehash folkish apologetics here, but rather explain how postmodernism is a return to tradition. Yes, that’s right—a return to tradition.

When you ask different people what a return to tradition looks like, you’re liable to get as many answers as there are people. Ask James Lindsay what a return to tradition looks like, and he will tell you the civil rights era of the 1960s. Ask Jordan Peterson and will tell you the liberal individualism of the Enlightenment. Ask a “racist liberal” and he will point to the 1790 Naturalization Act.²

If none of these seem to you like strong enough meat, you’re not alone. And this is what people are doing when they critique postmodernism as “modern”—they are making modernity a merely temporal descriptor, as though what is modern is simply the last thing that happened, as though it’s a quantitative and not a qualitative descriptor. On this account, the Catholic Integralism of Action Française was more modern than the French Revolution, which means we need a better account. Yes, postmodernism is pushing us forward, but in a more important way, it’s pushing us back—way back.

Postmodernism represents a revival of the archaic.³ Just as postmodernism was taking over the culture in the 1980s, you saw a celebration of indigeneity—world music was all the rage. The fragmentation and flattening of perspective seen in cubism and expressionism looks uncannily like art from the archaic world. Heidegger’s thrownness and Sapir-Whorf represent a return to tribal ethics and the bounded horizon of the folk. The archaic is all around us, and always has been. It has never been transcended by modernity, but only ever concealed by it, and now that modernity is failing, the archaic is peeking through the cracks, waiting like a sprig of grass to overwhelm the fallen structure and reclaim sovereignty over the artificial.

So if modernity is not a temporal category, then what is it? We answer this in our article on the Trump shooting, War of the Worldviews—modernity is not a measure of time, but the epistemic longhouse.

From the beginning of time to the End of History, each political great power had its own set of concepts, imperatives, and political language, and none could truly understand the other. By the turn of the 21st century, even a Chinese communist, a Muslim theocrat, and a secular humanist spoke the same political language, obeyed the same basic imperatives, and framed the world by the same concepts. The epistemic worlds of mankind had been growing fewer since at least the Axial Age, and now we had finally collapsed them all into one, which we call “modernity”.⁴

Modernity is the drive toward one epistemic framework shared by all humanity. It is the subordinating of folk to world. It is, in short, the culmination of the Axial Age.⁵

It may seem odd to say that modernity has roots that go back 3,000 years. But if we look below the surface, not just to what has gone wrong since 1798, or 1688, or 1517, or whatever other date—when we look at the principles and justification behind everything that has gone wrong, we see that it has deep roots. Maybe you’re not comfortable with calling everything since Plato “the path to modernity”. Sure, that’s fine. But a rose by any other name. Whatever we want to call it, the world has been getting a lot smaller, and that has led us to where peoples and nations and everything that gives colour and meaning to the world is now under assault.

But there has been a thread running from the Renaissance through to postmodernism which has pushed back against all that. Postmodernism rejected the universalism of the Enlightenment; in rejecting the Enlightenment it rejected the individualism of Protestantism; in rejecting Protestantism it rejected the abstraction of Scholasticism; in rejecting Scholasticism it rejected the anti-tribalism of Plato; in rejecting Plato it rejected the revolution of the Axial Age. Did it reject all this thoroughly and consistently? Certainly not. But the overall thrust of postmodernism moves against all these things.

Postmodernism is folkish in its structure, but it was a movement of its time, so it was bound up with post-WWII anti-whiteness. This is about as far as most people are prepared to examine it. This is a shame for the right, because the left has exhaustively examined postmodernism, and when its true implications became clear, the left dropped it like a hot potato. To understand why, we must examine its history.

Postmodernism is not a term used by any academics who study it—they call it poststructuralism. Poststructuralism grew out of proto-existentialists like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, specifically the perspectivism of Nietzsche, the thrownness of Heidegger, and the emphasis on the pre-rational in all three. Man is always already embedded in a context, a product of historical and biological givens, which are not chosen by him and certainly not reached through a process of rational deliberation. He is, instead, a product of circumstances, including the circumstances of race and biology. Everything is handed to him and unchosen, including meaning, which has no trans-historical source upon which it can draw outside of the folk.

Apart from this proto-existentialism, poststructuralism was also born out of New Criticism. This was a movement influenced by reactionary modernist T. S. Eliot and founded by John Crowe Ransom, a Southern Agrarian who wrote against the influence of industrialism on the traditional South. New Criticism rejected the older approach to literary criticism that sought to locate meaning outside the text, to examine it in light of its historical, philological, and biographical circumstances. Rather, New Critics examined each text in itself, seeing it as a self-contained unit that was analyzable on its own terms. New Criticism later fell out of favour in the of eyes feminist academics who criticized it for not sufficiently attending to gender inequalities and power dynamics.

Out of these two main currents arose poststructuralism, which as one would expect, arrayed itself against structuralism. Structuralism itself arose in the early 20th century, launched in effect by Ferdinand de Saussure’s influential Course in General Linguistics. For structuralism, aspects of culture (such as language, art, traditions) are related to the totality—the particulars are related by way of a structure, which is abstract and law-governed. Structuralism has some substantial truth to it, focusing on the reciprocal effect of language and culture on its bearers. But structuralism also maintains that the relationships within the structure depend for their meaning on a referent outside the relations themselves, which makes it ultimately universal and anti-folkish.

Poststructuralism’s fundamental critique of structuralism is to say no, these relations are all we have. Yes, structuralism is right in that the reciprocal effect of culture and bearer means that the relations, thus society, is always in flux.⁶ But whereas structuralism has reference to a structure outside the relations, postmodernism denies the ability to get outside these relations, in the same way you might view a scene from different angles to gain different perspectives, but will never be able to escape all perspective—there is no “view from nowhere”.

Poststructuralism understands the inherently perspectival nature of discourse, including rational discourse. There is no “god’s-eye view” outside of all perspective, or if there is, it is completely inaccessible and unintelligible, bordering on gibberish. Because of this, poststructuralism is inherently distrustful of “grand narratives” about history, culture, art, or anything else. It sees these grand narratives as too universal, too totalizing, and looks upon them with suspicion as nothing more than a useful tool in the hands of power,⁷ put forth most famously by Foucault in his Discipline and Punish.

Poststructuralist literary criticism, for example, tends to follow New Criticism in looking at the text itself. It does not necessarily ignore the context (it playfully relishes the “text/context” pun), but inverts the traditional primacy of context over text, of the circumstances surrounding the text, making the text primary and the circumstances secondary. This is the source of the famous postmodern pronouncement of the “Death of the Author”, where even the author himself can be ignored, or the text read in ways that the author never intended.

In the 1980s, poststructuralism developed into New Historicism, both a refinement of and a departure from it. The acknowledged founders Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher integrated a loose movement already underway, which agreed with the poststructuralists that grand narratives were to be rejected, but disagreed with them on the point of the text standing on its own. New Historicism says no, we must bring in historical context.

One of the ways in which New Historicism challenges grand narratives is by emphasizing the details “on the ground”. It does not focus on the upper classes, but prefers to look at the common folk. One of the characteristic ways it does this is by giving precedent to the anecdote over the official history.

Traditional uses of history are “totalizing” in their explicit or implicit view that, for instance, the sixteenth-century belief in “order and degree”, or the eighteenth-century premium placed on individual autonomy, were assumptions shared by a whole culture, or at least by a whole literate class within a culture. […]

New Historicists wield the anecdote, which in French is known as petite histoire, “little history”, as a weapon against the “totalizing” dangers of the grand narrative or grand récit. […]

Catherine Gallagher notes that “mainstream historians” despise anecdotes, or tolerate them only as “moments of relief from analytical generalization”. They are wary of intriguing and amusing stories, because these, she writes, might interfere with the distance from the past that historians cultivate in the service of a “protocol of objectivity”. It is indeed the case that professional historians are suspicious of la petite histoire, though not, I would argue, quite for the reasons Gallagher proposes. For most of the twentieth century the idea of anecdotal history was a threat because it evoked the old-fashioned, gossipy history of Great Men and Women that historians were striving to get away from through such innovations as Annales history or the New Social History of the 1960s and 1970s.⁸

The reader may be wondering at this point what on earth rejecting Great Man history has to do with folkishness or anything right-wing. Deleuze aside,⁹ poststructuralism was never quite able to fashion itself into a weapon for the right, even if the elements are there lying fallow. Part of the reason why it couldn’t is because of its “anything goes” approach to textual criticism which does indeed collapse into subjectivism.¹⁰ New Historicism resolves this problem and it is here that it becomes truly dangerous.