What They Won't Tell You about Post-Modernism

We've heard it before about a million times from every authority that post-modernism is evil, it has given us LGBT ideology, assailed democratic values, and seems almost in league with Islam as it changes the face of Europe for the worse. But everything has a deeper story, and post-modernism is no exception. One must ask, has post-modernism been corrupted by those in charge? And if so, is post-modernism itself actually right-wing? Is post-modern chaos in fact designed to serve the interests of the people by destroying that which would otherwise destroy them? I think my investigation into the subject can shed some light on what post-modernism is, what it is achieving, and why it is an opportunity in the long run, rather than an attack directed solely at White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. As such, this article will be a short tour of the history of ideas, but more precisely, ontology, which is that part of philosophy which concerns being and existence.

The ancient view of reality to paraphrase it very shortly is of an organic nature in which everything has an essential quality as well as a natural existence. To Plato, Socrates, Cicero, and even religious leaders like Jesus, things did not merely exist aimlessly, everything had a purpose, and the human purpose they proposed, was to pursue the good and live in harmony with divine reality. One gets a fairly succinct picture of this viewpoint in the New Testament; “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." (Matthew 6:19-21). Overall, the ancients were extremely optimistic about the human experience, the purpose of life was transcendent and knowable by correspondence with basic observations of the visible world. The light of this era was put out on the 24th of October 1648 when the Peace of Westphalia was concluded. The peace treaty ended the 30 years war with the agreement that all parties would allow the freedom of conscience of all their subjects. For the first time in history, you had the right to your religious opinions, and this accelerated the pace of the emancipation of the masses, however there were downsides, which included the rise of materialism as a replacement for the old order. Yet one of the downsides which perhaps we notice most today, stems from the fact that while all opinions have an equal right to be heard, not all opinions are equal. Before freedom of conscience, the right to have an opinion belonged to a privileged few cloistered in a monastery or at a university, who, after a long life of apprenticeship would become abbots or travel to the king's court and climb through the various ranks of courtiers, only then would they have the right to hold *some* opinions. This degree of quality control meant that the kind of people that CNN now employs, that is to say, the village idiots and idlers who spent their money frivolously and talked smack about their betters, would very often get beaten with sticks, rather than being given high paying jobs in the city. It was a more silent, and peaceful world as a result of there being both fewer idle opinions and the slow speed of the spread of information. As Oscar Wilde said; "Most people are other people, their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation." So one may in fact, object and say that in a world with freedom of thought we have to live with the noise of ill-considered opinions. There is a popular Hindu saying which also agrees that one should "speak only if it will improve on the silence." This is something far beyond our current cultural horizons, but it is nevertheless necessary for maintaining our collective sanity that we at least learn to listen more than we speak, but I digress.

Nevertheless, the new world which replaced the old order of organic naturalism was modernism, and it elevates man, not to the status of a moral being whose greatest goal is living in harmony with divine law, but contains a new promise of a mechanistic world. Galileo, Newton, and Darwin belong to this age of history, and they assure us that everything can be quantified empirically and that humankind can, with the assumption of scientific materialism, come to eventually know everything. There is a degree of optimism in the scientific world-conception, humanity is destined for great things, and can emancipate itself from kings and redeem itself through knowledge and reason. This view retains great popularity even today, but it is fatally flawed, for starters, the cult of reason all but destroyed Europe, scything down the monarchies and replacing them with republics in bloody wars finally culminating in the People's Spring of 1848. But before 1848, a smaller counter-revolution was underway in England, which essentially repudiated the modern world that was then emerging utterly, and they called themselves Luddites, after a man named Ned Ludd, who apparently started the movement. The Luddites were textile workers who were both men and women and in 1811 they finally had had enough. Their bosses had been buying machines which could perform their jobs better, and faster than the weavers could, their wages and working conditions plummeted. They could not unionize because they were now worthless, able to be fired at the drop of a hat. So they went on a rampage for 5 years destroying machinery. They were essentially terrorists, and eventually had to be suppressed by the Royal Army, in 1812, frame-breaking and machine destruction were made punishable by death by the Frame Breaking Act 1812. And as the inhumanity of the industrial world mounted in the slums of Victorian England, conservative thinkers, such as Joseph-Marie de Maistre, Edmund Burke, and Klemens von Metternich had earlier decried both the end of the old order of kings, but also decried the new technocratic elitism of the French Revolutionaries. Finally however, the Great War of 1914-1918 had effectively made industrialization's inhuman effects most apparent, the new kind of war was no longer a battle between people, but a meat-grinder, a machinery of death. The same textile frames that took the jobs of the simple Luddites a century earlier had morphed into aeroplanes, tanks, and howitzers, and after the war, Communism and Fascism held the government in Russia, Italy and Austria, and each was thoroughly devoted to modernism, although philosophers tried to unseat modernism tirelessly. Marx and Engels looked forward to a time of autonomous workers in Communism, Max Stirner and the Anarchists tried their best to encourage the destruction of society as we know it, and lastly René Guénon, Oswald Spengler and Julius Evola attacked modernity by synthesizing the thoughts of the original reactionaries like Metternich and de Maistre and updating them.

The short history of modernity has proved that everyone hates it and its inhumanity completely, from every side of the political spectrum, across every class barrier and every religious belief. There has been a long battle to unseat modernism, a battle fought with renewed vigour every time the scientists invented a machine which stole the livelihood or lives of working class people. The difficult bit, has always been in finding a reason to deflect the blows of scientific materialism. This modern world has got the thread of material competence and it won't let go, but at some point we must stop the machine or we all become interchangeable and worthless consumers. This is where post-modernism takes the stage and insists that all truth is relative. Post-modernism is therefore anti-modern, Foucault and Derrida are neither right-wing or left-wing, they are in fact reactionaries, accidental reactionaries no doubt, but it doesn't matter. Post-modernism is not anarchy, it is stronger, it is idea-anarchy, but here's the real genius; modernism was based on an appeal to the authority of physics, and claimed that because physics is mechanistic, we can treat every area of knowledge as subordinate to physics. It was based on an idea of atoms as billiard balls, which was popular before anyone knew anything about atoms. Now that we know what atoms are, and how they don't behave rationally at all, post-modernism can use the same culturally accepted syllogism about atoms from before, and arrive at the conclusion that the world is fundamentally anti-rational.

So post-modernism is idea-anarchy, chaos, and it seeks to plunge the world into chaos, rather than accept the conclusions of modernism, which seems to be the building of our own replacements through machine learning. It is the Butlerian Jihad from Frank Herbert's Dune, the spirit of the Luddites doing whatever is possible to break the machine. So the question remains, will it always be interpreted according to the orthodoxies of the liberal left, or does post-modernism have a greater purpose? It seems to me that idea-anarchy cannot be kept chained and busying itself with 78 genders and safe spaces in a consumerist paradigm, it has to do something, start a riot at the end of the world. That's why my prediction is that this form of anarchy will be short lived, and we will have to pass through it in order to recapitulate to the naturalistic order of the ancients. It is worth noting, that this take-down of materialism is not a take-down of science, it is merely an attack on an oppressive ontology which was born from removing God and hence, divine reality from nature. The post-modernists did not have the ability to accomplish this, instead they made use of scientific discoveries to launch an attack on materialistic certainty. But herein lies the problem, post-modernism has the potential, if taken seriously enough, to completely end science and do to the post-Christian west, what Al-Ghazali did to the Middle East. This is undesirable, therefore the goal, at least for now, is to decide how seriously we are going to take post-modernism and now with science dethroned by competing political interests, especially by LGBT groups and the underlying rational of post-modernism itself, to decide what role science will be allowed to play. Also we will eventually have to decide how much of a role we give to the free-market, religion will also get a second evaluation through the idea-anarchy, and so will nation states. The future that post-modernism brings gives us the chance for a complete re-evaluation of truth for the second time in history. The collapse-to-nihilism predicted by some may or may not happen, but it cannot last if it does. If in the final evaluation the world is inhuman, humans will be forced to conclude that we are not of this world, and that realization would perhaps in a moment mend many of our difficulties.