[The Modern Left: A Marriage of Post-Modernism and Narcissism, Part II
The Modern Left: A Marriage of Post-Modernism and Narcissism, Part I]
In Part I of this series I discussed an interview with Stephen Hicks to illustrate how the Post-Modernist Left has mis-used and aggrandized Post-Modernism as an assault upon Reason. Post-Modernism is a useful, though ultimately minor, philosophical idea (it falls far short of being a theory) that helps offer an understanding of subjectivity and the problem of objectivity; when the Post-Modern idea was abrogated by the Left for their ideological purposes it abandoned reality and reason and became merely a tool of intimidation and power.
In Part II I considered Richard Landes's discussion of PoMo as a tool used for its utility in disguising the failures of Leftist ideology, akin to (failed) Millenialists' denials. In Richard's words:
In millennial studies jargon that’s cogntive dissonance at recognizing (and denying) the failure of one’s outrageously hopeful expectations, at the horror of witnessing the God that failed.
Here, rather than acknowledge that the failure of expectations was due to a misreading of human nature, we have people throwing out the very effort to accurately read the world of humans.
The third leg of the stool supporting the PoMo narrative is the Psychological. Post-Modernism, an idea that facilitates intellectualization, is the perfect defensive structure for the Narcissist, fulfilling many unconscious needs. The core of the Narcissist's relationship to his own outputs was eloquently captured in a quote that Stephen Hicks offered in his interview with David Thompson (and that Richard used in his post, PoMo Unpeeled: David Thompson talks with Stephen Hicks, as well):
SH: Pomo is rhetoric-heavy, yes. But rhetoric is a tool, so one can ask how it’s being used and why it’s being used that way. The postmodernists have rejected reason, and along with it concern for evidence and consistency. What then is the purpose of rhetoric? In pomo practice, there are a couple of possibilities.
One is that rhetoric becomes a kind of subjectivist expressionism - you play around with language and hope that something interesting pops out. Derrida is often like this - I think of him as a performance artist of postmodernism. In its darker moods, this approach recalls a line from Kate Ellis, a sympathetic-to-postmodernism commentator, who noted “the characteristically apolitical pessimism of most postmodernism, by which creation is simply a form of defecation." [Emphasis mine-SW] Whatever’s been processing and churning up inside you - you just let ‘er rip.
Leonard Shengold, in his essential book on child abuse, Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation, described Defensive Anality, in which all distinctions are reduced to an homogenized inchoate mass, feces. The abused child does this (unconsciously) in order to make sense of the impossible, to allow himself to believe that the parent who hurts him also loves him, to square the circle of bringing his perceptions into accord with his abuser's prescriptions. It is an impossible psychological task and the abused child's mind surrenders by turning it all into shit. Love, sex, hate are all then made equivalents. This defensive style is common to Narcissistic defenses and to Leftist Post-Modernism. Why and how does the Narcissist resort to such a primitive defense?
For the Narcissist, any failure is a narcissistic injury, threatening to cause intolerable shame and a catastrophic collapse of his self-esteem.
[One response to this conflict is commonly seen in the college student who has difficulty studying for a test: to not study and do less well than hoped is a minor disaster; what else could you expect? (while secretly hoping to do well and show your brilliance.) Alternatively, to study and then fall short is a catastrophe; your feared stupidity is confirmed! The defense was poorly adaptive at one time, when grades actually reflected accomplishments. In our PC college culture, one has to put in great effort to do poorly in terms of grades and the defense works tolerably well for our increasingly narcissistically damaged youngsters.]
If failure can never be tolerated or admitted ways must be found to hide evidence of failure and deny failure. Post-Modernism is the perfect tool for the job and has shown itself to be up to the task. Since there can be no objective standards for anything, no one can ever conclude that a liberal theory or policy has failed. The Emperor may be stark naked but in the world of the Post-Modernist, imagined clothing can be as beautiful as the finest couture; in fact, since to the Post-Modernist it is the language that describes the clothing that lends it beauty, the naked Emperor is actually considered to be better clothed than the conventional Emperor of dead white male infamy! This is the power of Post-Modernism; all nonsense is accorded the same, or higher, degree of authority than the most painstakingly, experimentally confirmed scientific theory.
Only Post-Modernists could fail to understand the brilliance of Alan Sokal's Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. The Post-Modernists can mouth the words of science but understand nothing of the concepts and think they have received wisdom. Because Sokal can use their language, which they idealize above the reality that language at its best approximates, they elevate feces to an ideal.
Narcissism stems from an early age and receives a tremendous surge of psychic investment during the anal period when the child is becoming civilized and learning to control its bodily urges. When a child is first being toilet trained it is common for the parents to treat its outputs, the feces, as a treasure. As the child develops they soon learn that feces is not a treasure but if offered in the wrong place and time a source of shame. The Narcissist defensively regresses to a state in which undifferentiated, meaningless verbiage (feces) are no longer considered to be distinct from more sophisticated verbal outputs. To the Narcissist any theory they adopt or invest in is important because it comes from within them. Proof or evidence is unnecessary because its provenance supplies all the justification it needs. Since it is their "crap", it must be important! The Narcissist is like the little child, desperate to please its mother, struggling to push out a treasure for her. The fact that their undifferentiated mass has no intrinsic value is of no consequence.
Post-Modernism, Left wing ideology, and Narcissism are thus a menage a trois of mutual dependency. The Narcissist who needs to see himself as more caring, smarter, and more moral than the crypto-fascists on the right, can never admit that a liberal policy has failed because the failure of an idea he holds is an injury to his self-esteem. An attack on his belief is thus an attack on him; the two cannot be separated. This is also why so much discussion from the Left contains so much invective and so few attempts at reason or marshaling of evidence; since they are so emotionally invested in their beliefs, they must defend them as if they are defending themselves. It is no wonder that our political discourse has been so coarse.
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