In this episode, we discuss the postmodernist siege at Columbia University, and why postmodernism is the greatest boogeyman of our time. We're joined by Gio, an artist and podcaster, to discuss the situation.
00:03:53.280It's all the terrible, you know, quasi-Marxist lockdown stuff.
00:03:57.940Like, oh, you know, no one can walk through without, you know, their reparations pass or whatever.
00:04:04.060People scream in all kinds of stuff at possibly Jewish students.
00:04:08.580We've got a guy who, of course, looks exactly like this, you know, trying to stop a professor for coming on to the campus because he's Jewish.
00:04:18.680A lot of people, very angry, large protests going on here.
00:04:22.440And it's interesting because the response to this has been, oh, got rid of Gio instead of getting rid of this.
00:04:32.100So the response to this has been very interesting.
00:04:35.700We've had a lot of people screaming about actions that need to be taken.
00:04:40.860We've had a lot of people saying, you know, this is the next Charlottesville, which is a very interesting framing for many people on the right to take.
00:04:48.540Or, you know, from the mainstream conservative view to take.
00:04:53.740But I feel like this was inevitable, right?
00:04:56.040This has been building for a long time.
00:04:58.120You know, there's been this back and forth of kind of inter-left-wing political discourse or, you know, infighting.
00:05:07.440You know, are the woke going to be in charge or kind of more of the establishment left that tend to be more pro-Israel in charge?
00:05:13.960What's going to be the dominant faction inside the left on universities?
00:05:19.940And we've had, you know, the first you had the pro-Palestinian side strike with all of these protests.
00:05:26.500And then you kind of had the pro-Israeli side, you know, kind of strike with the firing of a number of administrators or other people put under pressure to make sure that they're kind of pushing back.
00:05:36.980And now we see kind of the reemergence of the woke vanguard.
00:05:42.680Well, it's hard to say because, again, on the one hand, it is sort of like the importing of ethnic rivalries into the domestic politics.
00:05:53.680Although I will say that this is different because of the relationship between the American government and the Israeli state.
00:06:02.880Now, unlike a lot of people in political right, I tend to be more sympathetic with the Palestinians.
00:06:08.060I think the actual things that are going on are quite terrible.
00:06:11.680And I pray for the end of the destruction of human life as quickly as possible.
00:06:18.640And I mean, whether you want to talk about proportionate responses to what happened on October 7th is a different issue.
00:06:27.040But it's certainly the actions that have been taken or have been incredible and have been devastating.
00:06:33.180But that being said, when it comes to these protests, it's one of those things that, again, to relate to the main topic about postmodernism.
00:06:39.900And it's one of those issues where political categories tend to be shaken up and tend to be mixed.
00:06:45.920Because on the one hand, the political discourse in America, particularly among normative conservatives and normative liberals, or what constitute the mainstream, is that, yes, of course, you know, the right wing or rather conservatives are pro-Israel.
00:07:01.880And the left have been sort of on the pro-Palestinian side for so long.
00:07:08.220And a criticism of that is inconceivable from the right wing because, of course, criticism of that state in the Middle East from the right is, of course, verboten and illegal and so forth.
00:07:19.760But that being said, I think that there is a weird mix of political categories because there are numerous critics who are either the political right or even conservatives that are looking at the actions in Palestine.
00:07:32.780But I think what's really key is to divorce the greater leftist sort of activism you see in university with the concrete issues of what's going on in the ground in Gaza.
00:07:45.560And that's very difficult because, of course, the political left has monopolized this issue for so long.
00:07:52.000But when it comes to university campuses, it's interesting because out of all the issues, this is the one that gets the ire of the state where they arrested Ilhan Omar's daughter, I believe, got arrested or she was escorted out of university.
00:08:10.280Because, of course, all the elite kids, they all go to, like, Columbia or Harvard.
00:08:16.180And whether, I mean, personally, I mean, oh, man, I sound so, I know what I'm going to sound like.
00:08:22.160But as much as I do not like someone like Ilhan Omar, I do think that escorting and, you know, suspending her daughter, if she hasn't done anything wrong, that's kind of like, wow, that's pretty severe.
00:08:39.480But I will say that the intimidation and towards professors who are Jewish or students who are Jewish, of course, that's, you know, that shouldn't be allowed.
00:08:51.840But see, this is the problem with this inter-leptist conflict is because where do you set in the progressive stack?
00:08:59.000Do you side with Israelis or Jewish academics or do you side with the largely student body who do side with Palestine?
00:09:10.800Because this is one of the few times in which the elite opinion of the left do not line up with the, you know, pedestrian or the ground level grassroots opinion of most people.
00:09:21.500Most people on the ground who are of the political left are very pro-Palestine.
00:09:26.340But when it comes to the actual institutions, the actual fortitude and testing of it, that's what the problem is.
00:09:34.260Now, my prediction will be that I think the political left can find a synthesis or a solution in terms of American domestic culture or politics.
00:09:45.120What they will do is they will sort of, and evoking Charlottesville is very interesting in this regard.
00:09:52.140I think what they'll do is they'll start, they'll focus and they'll hammer down on trying to rein in the quote unquote anti-Semitism on a cultural level.
00:10:02.520Right. But they'll say that criticizing Israel is not in itself a criticism of Jewish people proper.
00:10:09.500And they'll sort of try to square that circle.
00:10:11.620Now, whether they can square that circle is difficult because, of course, nowadays, especially in university campuses, you have a lot of different people of different backgrounds that do not share the same cultural understandings or the same historical understandings of people, for example,
00:10:28.860who have come from a Western European or even Eastern European or North American ancestry, who have grown up with the sort of the awareness and the consciousness of the last century.
00:10:41.640Right. When you have people of vastly different cultural understandings, then then this is a very big problem when it comes to this issue in particular.
00:10:52.800And like I say, I'm very sympathetic to people of the Palestinians themselves.
00:10:57.060I think what's happening is, you know, very it's an atrocity.
00:11:02.060But that being said, I mean, yeah, I mean, this is from a right wing angle.
00:11:08.360And I don't know if we should say any more, but I think that the political left will try to wrap it up.
00:11:15.920And the political left will try to sort of mediate an understanding between accommodating people of one ethnicity and accommodating the vast majority of people who are pro-Palestinian.
00:11:29.720And I think these university protests are a growing pain.
00:11:32.200And one last point, I'm very sorry for rambling.
00:11:34.660But one last point is that you do see this sort of cultural model of university protest, the way that and the way that it was structured is coming from the boomers, coming from the 60s.
00:11:47.740This is, you know, the 68 Democratic National Convention or this is Kent State all over again.
00:11:53.620And, of course, I mean, I hope the police don't go out of their way to hurt protesters, obviously.
00:12:23.820Yeah, I agree with you that this is just a mess all over the place because, first, you know, personally, I think this is just a, at this point, a unresolvable ethnic blood feud between two peoples who have just been brutal to each other for a very long time.
00:12:39.340I think there's zero hope of the United States or anyone else, you know, negotiating them out of this scenario.
00:12:46.460And so I would just like it to not be on my shores.
00:12:49.340You know, when I say I don't want us involved, I mean, I really don't want us involved one way or the other.
00:12:57.480You know, there's a lot of people who perhaps don't like, you know, the perceived influence of Israel on United States foreign policy.
00:13:05.660And so they automatically side with Palestinians, even though, you know, many Palestinians would hate them and vice versa.
00:13:12.480You know, a lot of people who are not paying attention to perhaps, you know, the way that the United States has, you know, involved itself unnecessarily in this situation, feel some knee jerk reaction to involve itself in kind of a neocon foreign policy aspect and immediately side with Israel.
00:13:30.080So it's like, guys, this is this is just not productive like this.
00:13:33.400This is not helping the United States at all.
00:13:48.320You we need to devise divest ourselves from this impulse to have moral outrage at every event that happens across the world.
00:13:55.120Of course, we don't have that option because we specifically imported it here.
00:13:58.920So we you know that that that should be the ideal.
00:14:01.540That should be the way a normal, healthy nation would not be like, oh, wow, a random blood feud has flared up again in some country halfway across the world.
00:14:10.840It immediately needs to, you know, result in violence and protests across my nation.
00:14:34.340And in a way, that's kind of the revolutionary reenactment.
00:14:37.320Right. Like this is this is my this is my moment of the campus protest.
00:14:42.360Like even if there wasn't an issue to protest, I would need there to be an issue to protest just so I can go through the formative ritual of engaging in a protest as a leftist on a campus.
00:14:51.620You know, there's a lot of that happening.
00:14:54.920And so I think the the main thing is is just the frustration from watching this result.
00:15:02.500Let me bring this up really quick, because, you know, there have been a number of people who, like I said, you know, it's all the you know, the government needs to get involved.
00:15:10.820They need to come in and and take action.
00:15:14.900We've got Josh Hawley saying Eisenhower sent the hundred and first to Little Rock.
00:15:33.380Like they're in an interesting position or because I think that, you know, the one good thing, though, is there are certain elites in the American government.
00:15:40.820Government who realize that from a Democrat perspective, it's bad optics.
00:15:44.760And so they want the Israelis to cool it down or settle for a negotiated peace.
00:15:48.960And of course, Trump has said that he's he wants the conflict gone.
00:15:51.820He thinks that Netanyahu went way too far.
00:15:55.160And there's been a lot of, you know, there has been a lot of, you know, people used to think that Netanyahu and Trump, they were like best friends.
00:16:02.800But unfortunately, like I believe their relationship has strained.
00:16:06.640So at least there is solid agreement that this is a pretty negative thing on the world stage.
00:16:12.280I mean, I will push back a little bit on you, Oren.
00:16:14.500I would say that because of America's involvement, particularly in the in the sort of military industrial complex, the Middle East and in Israel in particular, I would say that it would be in the best interest of both Republicans and Democrats.
00:16:29.800Democrats to settle things as quickly as especially Biden going into this election now.
00:16:36.800But the problem is when you do have Republicans that have a very cavalier attitude towards human life and towards very complex geopolitical issues, especially in the Middle East.
00:16:47.260The way that things are already in the Middle East is incredibly complex.
00:16:51.000But I do see. And here's the thing, though.
00:16:54.180There is a yearning and a will to sort of put the lid on this and to pivot back towards Ukraine versus Russia.
00:17:04.160That's a much more salient thing for American voters.
00:17:06.400The fact that it's sufficiently abstracted from American history and involvement, you know, of course, I mean, you know, and of course, you know, that the spending bill recently.
00:17:20.940So I think a lot of people within the Biden administration, not Biden himself, because, well, well, let's not talk about the president of the United States, particular health and longevity situation.
00:17:33.300But I think that a lot of people in the Democratic Party, they realize that this is not good.
00:17:39.460And to send the National Guard to the protest, that would be that would be catastrophic, I think.
00:17:45.780Yeah. Sorry, I cut you off. No, no, no.
00:17:48.600I'm with you. I think the only reason I'm going to give Josh Hawley a pass is he also said that they should bring in the National Guard for the for the BLM riots.
00:17:57.740So, OK, yeah. Then that's. Yeah. Yeah.
00:18:00.520At least he's an equal opportunity. You know, this one isn't just for, you know, anti-Israel protests.
00:18:06.960He's just like, when in doubt, National Guard it.
00:18:09.700And it's like, I can respect that that level of consistency.
00:18:12.560Well, it's not like other people who have a very unprincipled exception that, you know, they let things pass.
00:18:19.580But when it comes to this issue. Right.
00:18:21.200But but that being said, I mean, I think that.
00:18:24.460The BLM riots clearly demonstrated a lot of political politically motivated violence and destruction, but I don't know.
00:18:35.480I think. Have there been intimidations and have there been violent, perhaps?
00:18:42.020Perhaps. And then maybe you can argue this.
00:18:45.120But I mean, yeah, there's been a lot of a large number of protests.
00:18:51.760As much as there has been involvement by the American state, I think when it comes to these ethnic conflicts, who really bears the brunt of overt protest and violence?
00:19:03.560It's the American people, obviously. Right.
00:19:05.780And here in Canada as well, there's been huge protests.
00:19:08.620I mean, most of them have been peaceful, of course. And like I said, it's their right.
00:19:12.020Like, listen, I was a big I am a big supporter.
00:19:14.480I was a big supporter of the truckers.
00:19:17.200And so therefore, I would be a hypocrite to say that as long as pro-Palestine protests on parliaments, you know, in downtown Ottawa, as long as they're being peaceful, then I think, you know, it's perfectly fine.
00:19:30.620But I mean, it is an issue, though, because academics don't know what to do now.
00:19:35.120And a lot of a huge swath of the organs of power, they're in a huge conundrum over this.
00:19:42.680And but like you said, I mean, from from a conservative or politically rightward perspective, it just goes to show you that a lot of the political categories in the Western world have been so thoroughly mixed up and have been so thoroughly.
00:19:57.620Um, slotted into a certain direction than what a lot of people truly feel.
00:20:04.900Right. So it's a very complicated issue.
00:20:07.860But guys, go on. I know you wanted to cover certain tweets here.
00:20:10.460Well, I wanted to bring this up because I think Peachy Keenan put this pretty well.
00:20:17.060You know, she's responding to a tweet that says American colleges and universities spent the last decade censoring conservatives, canceling events, punishing teachers, et cetera, because they wanted to ensure their students never felt unsafe.
00:20:28.740They spent unaccountable millions institutionalizing left wing diversity programs.
00:20:33.620And her response, which I think is a very good one, is because no one cared when they came for the whites, white kids are the default villains in academia.
00:20:42.260No one except a few conservative voices even dared to stand up to them.
00:20:46.120Now that Jewish kids are under attack, the institutions built to protect them are going there are doing their job.
00:21:52.560But I'm pro tanks in Harvard Yard anyway.
00:21:55.200So, you know, my deal is I'm not going to make you tell me explain your your sudden interest in putting tanks in Harvard Yard as long as you're willing to do it.
00:22:04.080However, she makes a really good point that, you know, we have seen this kind of animus.
00:22:12.920We've seen this level of hateful speech and protest and attack towards, you know, people of European descent across college campuses in North America and the wider Western world for a decade.
00:22:41.700And all of a sudden, boom, like clockwork, this is popped up.
00:22:45.960And yeah, you have to you have to think, OK, so I guess there was this understanding that eternally there was going to be some carve out for the, you know, the stories of colonization and all this stuff.
00:22:59.640All those narratives that apply to broader Europe were not going to be applied to Israel.
00:23:22.000I mean, I think that, you know, OK, you can make the argument that the British involvement in that region of the Middle East back, you know, even before.
00:23:29.580World War Two, you could argue that a lot of the lines weren't drawn properly.
00:24:37.900But the problem is, though, when you use the narrative of like settler colonialism and all that, it feeds into domestic culture war politics.
00:24:56.900But that being said, like my argument is that I think you have to divorce that from what's actually going on in the Middle East.
00:25:02.880But that doesn't give you any comfort when a lot of the policies that universities have been instituted, like you mentioned.
00:25:10.720Now, listen, I'm no fan of a lot of the original like post-gamer gay people that were going to university campuses like Steven Crowder or Milo or like I have criticisms of Christine Off Summers.
00:25:24.500Like I have criticisms of all these figures.
00:25:55.960And so in that sense, I agree with Curtis, people like Curtis Yarvin to this in the sense that creating these big spectacles for the political right or conservatives probably wasn't the best policy.
00:26:05.960But that being said, that older model of the university being a haven of debate and free speech.
00:26:19.660Gio being an old head again, although he menachrome used a word I can't use on YouTube.
00:26:23.720But but that being said, I think that because the universities have built up such an apparatus of unprincipled exceptions the whole way through and that really that like 1960s new left idea of free debate, like that was kind of a ruse to begin with.
00:26:41.640But they're really suffering now when you have people of entirely different historicity and political understanding now confronting the real face of administrative power.
00:26:54.600And in a sense, I think these universities, they've really dug their own graves when it comes down to it, like you said, Oren.
00:27:01.720But like I said, like I even with these the Ukrainian Russia issue is a very complex one.
00:27:10.620And I my fear is that a lot of very complex geopolitical issues when they are interpolated and taken up into the Western culture war, a lot of the actual genuine nuance gets lost.
00:27:23.080And but because it is this giant spectacle, I mean, all protest politics, I mean, you know, you don't have to read Burnham or you don't have to read, you know, A.A.'s book right on on this issue to know that a lot of the populism, either in the left or the right, when it comes to the spectacle and the public ritual of protest is in a way a weird postmodern spectacle.
00:27:45.860And in a way, really, besides the point when it comes to hard decisions that are made, both domestically and geopolitically.
00:27:53.640So but but like I say, there is signs that they're going to probably put this away there.
00:27:58.800I mean, whether or not the Israelis will listen to the Biden administration is a different issue.
00:28:03.800But there is a lot of political will to just quiet this down.
00:28:07.700It's incredibly embarrassing for the political left.
00:28:10.360And they like I said, and Biden has an election to win against the evil orange Trumpolini.
00:28:18.400So it's it's just it also, by the way, you really do have to give it to Donald Trump to break the paradigm.
00:28:25.980Hopefully he's he keeps to it if he gets reelected.
00:28:28.620But he really does break the paradigm of the Republican Party by saying that, you know what, I think this is bad, too.
00:28:35.380You know, and I think I he wants a negotiated settlement, whether or not that's politically tenable in the Middle East is a different story.
00:28:43.420But the fact that Donald Trump is willing to grade against the norm of Republicans that when it comes to the Ukrainian issue and the Israeli issue with Gaza have posted some very wild and very deranged things about like, let's just like let's destroy them all.
00:28:59.860And the things I can't say on YouTube, like legitimate politicians have been posting this.
00:30:28.980And maybe we should move on to more theory-driven topics because I'm just, you know, we're going into political analysis.
00:30:35.160And then that's kind of like, but to give you a good tie-in, Oren, the politics of the spectacle has been something that's very persistent.
00:30:45.280Even when it's divorced from hard power and the way things operate, you still have this model of protest of either left-wing or right-wing populism.
00:30:56.380Of course, post-Charlotteville, right-wing populism in terms of public spectacle, you saw a little bit with Trump and Trump rallies.
00:31:03.880But, I mean, let's face it, that's been effectively punished by the state.
00:31:10.420But now that you're seeing that this is being punished by the state, or at least the workings of it are being punished by the state,
00:31:18.320there's a whole lot of political confusion going on.
00:31:22.680Honestly, I don't think it's going to be punished by the state.
00:31:25.000I think that they're making a show at most.
00:31:29.920They're slapping some people on their wrist.
00:31:31.820I don't know if you remember when the squad got arrested for protesting and they had to, like, fake putting their hands behind them
00:31:38.820because they didn't even handcuff them.
00:31:40.460Or, like, Greta Thunberg getting dragged away.
00:31:42.960And, like, every few months she gets dragged away by the police.
00:31:46.180Like, I really, I think that they have to go through the motions because the group being attacked is considered a little more worthy of protection in the progressive hierarchy.
00:31:58.800But, honestly, I don't think they can put this back in the box.
00:32:02.420Of course, this is my whole debate with AA.
00:32:04.640I think it will eventually quiet down.
00:32:06.620I think that eventually Israel will kind of achieve its goal, and this will fall off the radar of 90% of people.
00:32:16.820Outside of college universities and super online people, if you ask the average person what's going on in Israel, Palestine right now, they'd have no clue.
00:32:26.840Like, Ukraine is far more, like you said, salient for most Americans.
00:32:30.880That's something everyone actually knows, at least to some degree, is happening, as where I think this barely registers for anybody who's not directly plugged in.
00:32:38.280So I don't think you'll, I think you'll probably see the kind of the mainstream left beat back the woke vanguard slightly here.
00:32:47.380But I don't think there'll be a definitive victory for them.
00:32:49.600I think that's going to continue to see the rise of the world.
00:32:51.640They're not going to crack down the way they did with those campus protests, with campus speakers, or with Charlottesville, or with Trump rallies even.
00:32:59.960They're not going to, no, they're not going to jail any.
00:33:02.040I mean, maybe they'll jail a few people that are actually staging intimidations of certain academics.
00:33:08.460But, no, they're not going to crack down the way they have with a lot of, well, even recently, I mean, what was it, was it Switzerland, or was it Czechoslovak, which country they cracked down in a NAC on?
00:33:23.180Oh, I think it was in Brussels, wasn't it?
00:33:28.240So, no, that's not, I mean, they'll let the protests more or less try to peter itself out as the news cycle continues.
00:33:37.760Because even still, like, people, it's very funny when it comes to the news cycle, when it comes to the sort of decentralized media apparatus you find in places like X, you know, Twitter, where people, when the Iran thing happened, people are immediately giving their takes, like, oh, something's happening, and it's going to really lead to something.
00:34:00.980And people are hyperventilating on Twitter spaces, and some Twitter spaces have, like, 10,000 listeners, and they're, like, breaking news.
00:34:09.280And it's really, but then, of course, what happens is this, like, what usually happens in the Middle East, where there's a lot of chest thumping, there's a lot of exchanges back and forth.
00:34:18.660I believe Iran had to admit that one of the bases may have not been attacked, or who knows what happened, right?
00:34:27.100But then you have the cycle that gets grafted onto it, where people are almost yearning for it.
00:34:33.040They're yearning for something to happen, even though it might, you know, drag us into a new war.
00:34:38.240So, I think it really is kind of like a thirst for annihilation in some ways.
00:34:43.760It's a thirst for the ecstasies of something happening, which is very, I think, politically dangerous.
00:34:49.980And it's dangerous in terms of political discourse as well, because people are craving for a happening, and there's either frustration, or when happenings do occur, people...
00:35:03.240I think it's sort of like what, it's sort of like in Revelation, I may be pissing off some evangelicals here, but it's sort of like when Revelation, where it is said that Christ will return like a thief in the night.
00:35:14.980Like, the happening will occur like a thief in the night.
00:35:17.340When a happening occurs, you're not going to hear it on a Twitter space.
00:35:21.520It's going to be something that will catch people politically off guard.
00:35:26.460I mean, even the Ukraine conflict, there were certain people that did predict that it was going to happen.
00:35:31.520But, yeah, so I think happenings will occur like a thief in the night, more or less, Oren.
00:35:37.880Well, let's go ahead and try to transition to the theoretical topic of the stream today, which is postmodernism.
00:35:44.980So, the reason I want to address this, Gio, is I feel like there's so much jargon thrown around this topic.
00:35:52.680People rarely understand, you know, the postmodernists are after our kids and stuff, you know, like it's that.
00:35:58.820But there's not, you know, and there's a good reason to be worried about postmodern theory and many things that postmodernists have said.
00:36:07.980But I think it's often so far removed from the actual context of the movement and the moment we're in.
00:36:13.900And nobody really thinks about the implications of the moment we're in.
00:36:18.220If we're not going to embrace postmodernism, which I don't think we should, then we need to think about what else we would be embracing, where else we would be going.
00:36:25.880So, I wanted to begin at the beginning just to lay out some basics for people.
00:36:44.420It's tough because I think that when people think of these issues in terms of like reifying time periods, a great writer that I think we should bring up is Bruno Latour, who wrote this book called We Were Never Moderns.
00:36:59.140Because, okay, so to set this up, the claim of modernity being that time in terms of development is more or less stable, more or less linear, and that the whole world can be sunk into a modernist understanding of things.
00:37:16.900That we can pick apart nature, that man in relation to nature is increasingly abstract and increasingly a narrative of what a lot of postmodernists would call logocentrism.
00:37:27.160Where the primacy of human intelligence and of human language triumphs over nature.
00:37:33.800But what Bruno Latour is saying, and then of course postmodernity, is the criticism of the frustration of the modernist project.
00:37:41.600Now, listen, a lot of the original poststructuralists and postmodernists, they were of the new left, of course.
00:37:49.160And they talked about how the issues of various platforms of social justice, there are certain narratives that, for example, Western education and Western thought has ignored.
00:38:02.560And it's like trying to pick apart the various contradictions and issues that have not been highlighted and peoples that are sort of, quote unquote, left out of the equation.
00:38:12.720And so postmodernism is really, you know, if we go to say the Leotardian definition, would be the criticism or rather the awareness of the very slippery and fibrous notions of grand metanarratives in society.
00:38:29.460And rather these metanarratives, either very, you know, oppressive structures, or there's something that just simply does not graft onto the, quote unquote, real of what we experience.
00:38:41.980And that when you look down at the basis of things, most of it is language, most of it is discourse, and most of it, it comes from the ideational space.
00:38:51.140Rather than anything we can point to as a, for example, a dialectical movement in history.
00:38:57.580So that's something that we can't really observe.
00:39:00.840And so even postmodernism was very critical of Orthodox Marxism, for example, because Marxism has a lot of predicates of what is social justice, of what is the movement of history, because they get this from Hegel, right?
00:39:13.140Of what we can see as a movement of capitalism.
00:39:16.200And so if you look, for example, to Frederick Jameson, in his book, Postmodernism, The Logic of Late Modernity, sorry, The Logic of Late Capitalism, where you can also call it late modernity, he points to the fact that you have this increasing decentralization of all things.
00:39:33.860You have a decentralization of information, and you also have, in the absence of grand metanarratives, you have a total collapse or a sort of a de-territorialization of culture.
00:39:46.960So, for example, there's no longer the high art, low art distinction.
00:39:50.540There's a sort of planetization of cultural products.
00:39:55.360Capitalism, of course, is the handmaiden of this, or late capitalism, in spreading various culture industry products throughout the world.
00:40:02.220And you don't have a sort of, a very cohesive civilizational narrative.
00:40:08.020But let's go back to Bruno Latour now, okay?
00:40:11.120So Bruno Latour in We Were Never Modern, he questions the assumption that we were modernist to begin with.
00:40:16.480Because what we see is that man is still in dialogue with the natural world.
00:40:21.760The project of the total revealing of nature has not been fulfilled.
00:40:25.680But also when it comes to, quote-unquote, modernity, when it comes to various places throughout the world, we can see that we're living in a sort of mishmash of people that have a different awareness of what modernity is.
00:40:41.620People live lives around the world that are thoroughly, that you wouldn't consider, quote-unquote, modern, the way that we would consider it in the West.
00:40:49.220And so you have to really address this hard distinction between, okay, we live in a modern period, now we have post-modernity, we're criticizing it, and we're criticizing those claims towards it.
00:41:01.820So in a sense, what Latour is trying to say, and again, I'm butchering this for time's sake.
00:41:06.860What Latour is saying is that to say that there's a post-modernity is the sweeping assumption that we were modern, quote-unquote, to begin with, that history is a progressive linear entity that we can visibly observe, that man's conquest of nature and the deconstruction of the natural world is more or less a surety, and that all people have been lifted up into this construct we call modernism.
00:41:32.660Whereas we don't observe any of those things. And post-modernism, as a reaction to that, Latour says, is equally something that is kind of absurd at its heart.
00:41:42.080And so in a sense, we can see that post-modernism, in a way, is really a reification and an acceleration of a lot of the predicates of the promises of modernity.
00:41:54.400That modernity has tried to perfect itself to the point of being an absence of itself, of going beyond itself.
00:42:01.200But personally, I think a lot of thinkers such as Zygmunt Bauman, John David Ebert, for instance, comes to mind, they call it liquid modernity or hyper-modernity.
00:42:13.160I think that is a more productive term for the place that we're living in currently when it comes to politics and culture in the internet age.
00:42:25.120Hyper-modernity is, to me, more of an apt descriptor than, quote-unquote, post-modernity.
00:42:30.560Because even post-modernity itself, for example, the claim towards relativism.
00:42:36.280Relativism, maybe for a time in terms of academic discourse, but I don't see relativism anywhere.
00:42:43.560I see an extension of a sort of modernist moralism or a morality complex that modern politics has been subsumed under.
00:42:53.740So a lot of people, a lot of critics in the political right or normie conservatives that talk about post-modern relativism, I think, I don't see relativism anywhere.
00:43:11.500We live in an incredibly moralistic society.
00:43:14.140It's just that the morality is quite different from a lot of pre-modern traditional systems of morality and theology and so forth.
00:43:23.160So we don't, we live in a very different form of ontological politics or, you know, moralistic politics than, say, a lot of people that criticize post-modernity, such as, who is the academic at Hillsdale?
00:43:39.280He wrote a whole book on post-modernity.
00:43:44.360But he talks about, like, the relativism aspect.
00:43:46.640I think that's probably one area in which critics of post-modernity have gotten wrong, is that the relativism claim has sort of been overemphasized.
00:44:01.280You know, one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you about this was an article that Alexander Dugan put out, and he mentioned the fact that in many ways post-modernism had become as dogmatic as modernism,
00:44:14.220had become as much of a, you know, a narrative and a very fixed thing, bringing forward, like you said, a lot of non-relativistic points.
00:44:22.460You know, having a very specific idea of what the world should look like and how to prescribe it.
00:44:27.780One of the things that happened recently, I don't know if you saw this, Chris Rufo has been tweeting out, like, everything that the new NPR CEO has said.
00:44:35.960He just got, like, got it set on some kind of repeat every hour.
00:44:40.560And so this new female CEO has said many things that are, you know, pretty bog-standard leftist things.
00:44:47.120And one of the things that she talked about was, you know, she used to be in charge of Wikipedia or one of the people in charge of Wikipedia.
00:44:54.980And she said, one of the things we recognize is at first we went with kind of this open and free, you know, model.
00:45:01.680But the purpose of the open and free model was to create equality.
00:45:06.280And what we learned was that openness and freedom does not create equality.
00:45:10.680It creates the opposite, which, you know, is a revelation that I think hurts conservatives as much as it does the leftists.
00:45:17.980But every time there's a lack of moderation, spaces online become right-wing automatically.
00:45:22.380Yeah, it's a weird thing that keeps happening that way.
00:45:24.620It's like there's some kind of natural order that emerges.
00:45:29.580But, you know, she specifically said, look, we got rid of the openness and the freedom because the primary goal was equality.
00:45:36.900And all of these mechanisms of openness and freedom, they were these kind of liberal modern solutions to bring about this thing.
00:45:46.180And so it feels like a lot of conservatives looked at the tools of kind of liberalism and modernity and thought that those were the ends, as where the postmoderns thought that the end was the equality or, you know, other promises made by liberalism.
00:46:02.620And the disconnect is between the application of these tools and the ends and why the application of tools didn't bring about the ends and why it's not okay or is okay to abandon the tools if they don't bring about the ends.
00:46:17.340And I pointed this out and then, like, wiggle distance came in.
00:46:27.680Internet disagreements aside, it feels like there's this big disconnect.
00:46:32.320Where conservatives don't realize that the large amount of what the postmoderns were doing and what they're trying to enforce, because like you said, it's not relative.
00:47:05.160I mean, even Frederick Jameson in Postmodernism, Logic of Late Capitalism, he even said this, I believe, in a few introductory chapters where he said, like, even reactionaries can become postmodernists.
00:47:16.900There's such a thing as a postmodern reactionary, and that really the open template of critique and deconstruction.
00:47:23.480And deconstruction is a very complicated term because I think a lot of people on the political left, like we'll call distance, like James Lindsay, they take that to mean, like, just the destruction of values.
00:47:32.240Whereas if you actually look at, if you've spent, you know, countless hours, such as I have, unfortunately, looking at a lot of poststructuralist texts from Derrida all the way up to Baudrillard.
00:47:44.240Baudrillard does have quite a bit of reactionary talking points, by the way, in terms of his pure postmodernism.
00:47:50.120I would say that deconstruction is responding to a philosophic tradition and doesn't necessarily mean the destruction of values per se, but rather just realizing the sort of hierarchy of texts, why certain assumptions with analyzing texts are placed upon people in terms of the reader, in terms of the relation between the other and the self.
00:48:12.600A lot of the deconstructive method is simply that.
00:48:15.140It's just a method of approaching the text.
00:48:17.580And then a lot of certainly the activist class around the 1980s to the present day have sort of like ascribed a lot of weirdo political intention to the phrase deconstruction.
00:48:43.440And there was a time when a lot of Western right wingers were reading him.
00:48:47.160A lot of publications were translating his work.
00:48:50.040But that time has passed because I think you have to recognize that.
00:48:54.800And Michael Miller, and forgive me for saying this, but you have to recognize that Dugan has his own agenda in terms of the civilization that he has formulated in terms of Eurasianism.
00:49:07.600And I think you have to be cautious of that.
00:49:10.540Like you have to be cautious with every reader.
00:49:12.760And I think that, you know, as a Westerner who is on the political right, who is a conservative, you have to really take what he's saying with a grain of salt.
00:49:19.880Because, for example, when it comes to postmodernism, he is correct in terms of tracing it back to a lot of Western Enlightenment principles.
00:49:29.180But what he's doing with that criticism is something that I wouldn't say is within the interests of Western people or even Western right wingers.
00:49:38.220And so I think a lot of the media spectacle around Dugan being like this, you know, Rasputin-like figure or like Western right wingers or Russia shills or that Dugan.
00:49:49.340I mean, there has been Western right wingers that have been in dialogue with Dugan.
00:49:52.240But, for example, he mentions the nouveau droit in that article, the European new right, the French new right.
00:50:09.260I'm not going to go further in my position in that conflict.
00:50:11.620But I think that you have to take what Dugan is saying with a grain of salt.
00:50:15.140Because certainly his criticism of postmodernism is quite interesting in that he wants to find a synthesis between tradition and the postmodern condition.
00:50:25.220But I think that synthesis relies on a lot of assumptions that run contrary to what a lot of Western people think and feel and believe.
00:50:34.260And what a lot of people in the political right in the West also think and feel and believe.
00:50:39.600His criticism is certainly interesting.
00:50:50.740I wouldn't consider Martin Heidegger a postmodernist, by the way.
00:50:53.160He's more of an existential ontologist.
00:50:55.000But I think that a lot of assumptions he makes is sort of kind of complicated and won't really fit.
00:51:02.860And a lot of the blame that he asserts on the West is also something not advantageous to a conservative project in North America, for instance.
00:51:13.060For example, he has his own version of relativism.
00:51:15.220He really harps upon this, like, third worldism and anti-racism, which is very funny how people call him, like, an evil fascist.
00:51:23.140And he does have certain fascistic tendencies.
00:51:25.640But in terms of, like, his third worldism, he really has sort of taken up this whole thing about Western racism and Western neocolonialism.
00:51:37.020But I will say the reason I bring this up is because you have to really examine with a grain of salt what he says, because there's a lot of times where he says very contradictory statements.
00:51:46.500For example, he's, you know, saying that years ago, he'll say, like, Ukrainians, we're all Belarusians, we're all brothers.
00:51:54.000Then when the war happens, he says very kind of off the rail things about Ukrainians.
00:51:58.860He'll say, like, there's statements he's made about criticizing multiculturalism, but then he said, well, you know, Russia has the superior multiculturalism, and we have to back our brothers in Africa and so forth.
00:52:10.160And so, yeah, I think Dugan, I think his story is more complex when it comes to being in dialogue with the Western political right.
00:52:19.840So I myself do not consider myself a Duganist.
00:52:22.140But his criticism of postmodernism, he's trying to find a way to safeguard against the excesses of what he perceives as Western postmodernism.
00:52:32.160But to do that, he's sort of like creating this weirdo Eurasianism, which is like kind of defeating the point in some ways in that article.
00:52:41.500But nevertheless, it's very interesting because he is very well learned.
00:52:44.280He's very well learned when it comes to Heidegger and poststructuralism.
00:52:48.340But I think that like all critics of postmodernism, whether it be him, whether it be a lot of critics of postmodernism who are Marxist, they're going to have to contend with postmodernism as a mode of critique that is there, whether you like it or not, whether you can deal with it or not.
00:53:05.660Because in some ways, and this is, it could be either a black pill or a clear pill.
00:53:10.440Again, I'm not, I have severe criticism of Curtis Yarvin, but I do think the clear pill thing is an interesting concept.
00:53:16.120So it could either be a black pill or a clear pill, which is that postmodernism as a mode of critique is not a sort of unified movement or a unified political enemy, but it's just rather the condition by which we find ourselves in an advanced technological and digital society.
00:53:33.640And we have to realize that we're coming in, and this is what Dugan says, and you can criticize him as well.
00:53:39.680And this is what other people, even Bruno Latour says, is that you're coming into dialogue with people that have radically different histories and radically different understandings because we live in a globalized world.
00:53:50.960And so in a sense, postmodernism is just a natural progression of things from modernity, or rather hypermodernity is more of a natural progression of things.
00:53:59.820And that we live in a technological society, we live in a digital society, and we live in an awareness of different peoples throughout the world.
00:54:08.260And therefore, for example, Mbembe, who wrote Necropolitics, talks about this.
00:54:12.560Now, I'm critical of that book as well, because it is a book of the current new left.
00:54:16.640It is very, like, harps upon anti-colonialism and so forth.
00:54:21.600I broke that down on my YouTube channel, by the way, my podcast, General Reviews.
00:54:27.560But Mbembe says this as well, that we have an awareness of the greater global South.
00:54:33.220Therefore, we're going to have to question a lot of our prior ideological predicates.
00:54:38.620So to wrap it all up, yes, I think Dugan's an interesting reader of postmodernism.
00:54:45.300And Mbembe is an interesting critic of postmodernism as well.
00:54:49.800But I think that all of these authors, you have to come up with a discernment and you have to take them with a grain of salt.
00:54:56.960Because like I said, a lot of these authors, whether it be new left thinkers or current new left thinkers like Akila Mbembe,
00:55:05.340or even people that are Eurasianists like Dugan, or people that are even on the political right, who are critics of postmodernism.
00:55:12.840You have to all take these people with a grain of salt because it's trying to examine the conditions that we live in presently.
00:55:19.840When it comes to the ought, though, that's different.
00:55:23.180And I will criticize people like Will Call Distance, as I always do, in the sense that, well, you know, liberalism ought to be this way.
00:55:31.300And we have to go back to that awareness of what liberalism is.
00:55:34.620But if liberalism is creating the conditions of a liquid or hyper or postmodern society, then that calls into question a lot of those ideological predicates that Western liberalism coming from the Enlightenment has created.
00:55:50.180And it's very easy to say that, well, you know, the Frankfurt School, I mean, the Frankfurt School does have a lot of impact on the new left.
00:55:58.120But when it comes to the sort of linear narrative of like, OK, there was modernism and that was beautiful because we were like classical liberals and that was great.
00:56:07.380Then there was this evil postmodernism that came and destroyed everything.
00:56:54.040You know, I truly wish that like Dugan was not in any way associated with Putin just because I find his I find his thought something that gets me thinking.
00:57:16.960Doesn't jive with other things he said and done.
00:57:18.800It's almost like he just stopped in the middle of writing a scholarly paper, dropped the agenda in and then continued on with what he was doing and became a political polemicist for Russia.
00:57:29.780Like and so it's a very unfortunate because, like I said, I find I do find there are certain thinkers that just I run into what they're saying and I'm like, oh, man, this opens something up for me.
00:57:38.880This helps me to understand or grasp something or put something together.
00:57:41.260And he he is at times one of those people.
00:57:44.340But I'm with you that his his project is garbage.
00:58:26.940But when and even Akilah Mbembe, I spent multiple videos reading line for line necropolitics because necropolitics truly is a monumental work of scholarship.
00:58:37.400But there are even instances where it's like, OK, like the whole like post-colonial leftist narrative.
00:59:02.980But it's a very interesting text, nevertheless.
00:59:04.840But even when you said Orin, like when it comes down to it, I think that there is criticisms to be made of the of the Anglo and European and Germanic enlightenment.
00:59:13.480But when it comes down to it, though, a lot of those concepts in a way were inevitability when you go further into the Western tradition.
00:59:24.500And so, you know, I did my little bit back in the day in the 2000s of like being anti-enlightenment.
00:59:28.840But I think that a lot of the Enlightenment, Western Enlightenment is a very rich source of what is like the sort of, you know, European consciousness.
00:59:37.780And to say that all of it was evil because of what's been produced now, or rather the perversions of Enlightenment thinking.
00:59:44.260And that's unfortunate with Dugan is that he takes up the perversions of Enlightenment thinking and he constitutes that as the whole thing.
00:59:50.220And of course, he's very anti-Western.
00:59:51.800And so, you know, and even when it comes right down to it, for example, like even, you know, Marxism does this as well.
01:00:03.680But I think that, for example, one last point of criticism of Dugan is that he mentioned Spangler in that article.
01:00:11.580And he mentions that Spangler is a critic of the West.
01:00:13.840I personally do not believe that Oswald Spangler was a quote-unquote critic of the Western Enlightenment.
01:00:20.780I think that Spangler was recognizing the awareness of a cyclical nature to all political constructs and to all civilizations and cultures.
01:00:30.060And so it's rather the recognition of a cyclical nature of winter, you know, eventually winter will come.
01:00:36.700And so I don't think that Dugan necessarily is a, like, an anti-Western critic in that, like, I mean, Dugan says very interesting things.
01:00:48.280Dugan is definitely a critic of the West.
01:00:49.880Yes, but Oswald Spangler, I don't think that you could claim that he's, like, an anti-Western thinker.
01:00:56.260To me, that just doesn't make any sense.
01:00:58.300He's rather recognizing that there is always, there's always going to be a decline in things, that it's natural.
01:01:06.860But the sort of Faustian spirit creates certain things and has a certain awareness of itself.
01:01:12.820And then, of course, Spangler, you know, you could, there's criticism of Spangler as well.
01:01:17.200But I wouldn't label him as an anti-Western thinker.
01:01:20.220I think I would say that, I would say that Dugan or that Spangler would think it almost impossible to be an anti-Western critic from inside the West.
01:01:28.560That even your critique of Western man would be colored by your existence inside that society.
01:01:38.260But before we go, or rather, before we transition over to the questions of the people, I know we packed this with a lot of breaking news.
01:01:46.460So we didn't spend a lot of time on the main topic.
01:01:48.300But I at least, and I may be asking you to the impossible question.