All the annoying activists plaguing the world today deserve thanks for demonstrating how we’re collectively more interested in following the age’s dominant narrative than determining the truth. It’s now untenable to maintain a vision of humanity based on reason alone. The conflicts and confusions of our post-everything world are a persistent feature of our psychology and history, and not a bug peculiar to our petty little age.
Modern discourse resembles suffering through 200 PowerPoint slides prepared by Karen from HR – all while being gnawed on by rats. We should all be forgiven for stepping outside for a cigarette, a frank discussion and a radical change of social policy. Having drawn our conclusions, why would we go back in for more of this abuse?
Word-Salad
The self-aggrandising and their choice epithets should be avoided like the plague – and worse still, like clichés. ‘Entrepreneur’ is one, ‘philanthropist’ is another. ‘Activist’ is easily the worst and should come with an enforced Stalker-like exclusion zone.
Unfounded moral puritanism and hateful saviour mentalities all smell of the worse type of bad faith, always bringing rude Parisian waiters to mind. The degree of conviction – measured in superglue, hair colouring and angry tweets – must in some way be directly proportional to the immensity of their error. Calculating their influence and dividing by this error means we arrive at a depressing figure. The popularity of such ideas is impossible to rationalise if rationality is our only criterion. The #abolish, #deconstruct and #whateverjustice do-gooders suffer from a herd mentality, and that takes away their autonomy. The truth is subordinated to status, social contagion, panic or tribal allegiance. Abstract rationality gives way to surviving the stampede. Truth has never been a communicable disease.
These contemptible fools with their low-order thinking ‘studies’ degrees notwithstanding, the well-educated might recall the point of philosophy wasn’t simply to agree with it. You might even recall your teachers insisting most philosophers – even those popular with activists – are at most 10% correct. Even if they are mostly right, it says nothing about the reliability of what’s being enacted in their name. If postmodernism is guilty of pompous wilful obscurity, it’s the sort of unhygienic word-salad that’s given the activist mind the crippling shits.
Crediting the righteous with an accurate understanding of today’s cultural worries seems a little over-confident. That’s not to say the work of all these philosophers isn’t interesting or worthless. Plato is fascinating too, and he is wrong on just about everything. Working your way through the tangle of ideas is philosophy’s appeal. The real damage is the vulgarised application of such ideas in the social-political arena and the moral urgency claimed for their mission. It also gives activists a self-assigned saviour role in the sort of Gibbonian grand narrative their thinkers urged scepticism towards. Conviction is absolute. Yet, all the truth in the world, Bob Dylan sang, adds up to one big lie.
The Argument from Friday Afternoon Meetings
Common everyday stupidity, inflated egos and good old-fashioned corporate incompetence do far more damage to our culture than all those do-gooders supergluing themselves to museums. Why do we attribute these problems to epistemology rather than the actions of a demonstrably flawed humanity?
Work is the perfect microcosm for our thought experiment. Doesn’t everyone with a day job relate to dealing with the bewildering stupidity of those around them? We’ve all suffered people who trade in first-name familiarity with soap opera characters, confuse ‘pacific’ and ‘specific’ and experience kitchen envy. We live in fear of those who prolong Friday afternoon meetings by asking dumb questions and use ‘izzit’ as a question tag.
Picture a world built from mid-wits, Peter Principle cubicle slaves and HR officers and then consider the cultural-corporate inertia that results. It is easy to see why most of us can’t tell which way is up. The appeal to relativism makes a little sense here – we inhabit radically different representations of the world, having over-indulged in favoured sections of the menu. Some pick carbs; some the hummus. But that tells us more about the limitations of the observer than the absence of anything objective to observe. Don’t we live in a world akin to a ten-thousand-piece jigsaw that arrived without a picture on the box? Most of us lack the bandwidth to resolve reality to an accurate focus.
We seem incapable of acknowledging that our institutions rapidly get away from us and never function at anything approaching their potential. This is true from the micro-scale of schools and SMEs to nation-states and those inexplicably popular religions. Your office isn’t a model of organisational perfection; it’s an ad hoc wiki cobbled together ‘pragmatically’ from custom, practice and ineptitude. The goatherders and camel drivers who built our culture weren’t significantly more or less capable than us. This is why we get Friday afternoon meetings consisting of a veneration for the corporate message coupled with total incompetence in its implementation. It’s called blind faith for a reason. The real source of all this cultural confusion has been hiding in plain sight. Everything is done on a whim, botched by corporate non-think and filtered through our myriad personal faults.
To be fair, deep down we all know what the issues are, but social pressure means we’re all collectively encouraged to deny them. Our business is healthy; HR is your friend. Diversity is our strength. We’re encouraged to lie to ourselves from sunrise to sunset. Spin, marketing and influence are all Orwellian methods of perception manufacture. The sane need mind-altering coffee to get through it. This isn’t a lack of any underlying reality; this is plain and simple cognitive distortion. We’re all looking at fractions of reality through the bottom of a very thick bottle. Scale that up.
Verbal Hygiene
Speaking truth too loudly is frequently detrimental – unless, of course, you’re the court jester. Speech codes, hate crime legislation and HR verbal hygiene policies have all become sovereign, widely weaponised and aimed at controlling what gets expressed. Such activist blasphemy laws do not decide what’s true; they decide how publicly we discuss it. Fahrenheit four-five-what? The cliché would have us believe the truth will set us free. Historically, it freed heads from bodies. Today, it’s more likely to cost your job and reputation.
The need for meaning, correct or not, does not imply a need for God(s) either. Our psyche does not have a God-shaped hole in it and never has. Activists with absolute conviction in race, gender and climate politics demonstrate how separate meaning and divinity really are. One is a cultural parasite; the other psychology. Deities are the rotten meme squatting in the empty house.
Yet Nietzsche was undeniably right about the consequences of his death of God. We haven’t lost the metanarrative; we’ve lost the monoculture. We imprint on one virulent meme or another: one that seems to explain the most at an acceptable cognitive/emotional price and can be intuitively grasped by a swineherd. For most of our herstory, religion was as complex as this lo-fi guide to the galaxy got. Modernity didn’t fracture claims to truth; it flooded the market with lowest common denominator alternatives. Truth became white noise. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the human condition.
The brain has long been known to interpret reality rather than merely picturing it. We can’t – and won’t – see enough of reality to determine its shape and extent. We have an epistemic horizon problem. Our record of correct inference does not inspire confidence: our popular solutions produce violent, jealous sky-gods and monsters under the bed. Or lost souls consulting astrology charts to determine guilt in cases of infanticide.
The vulgar form of the various postmodernisms takes a reasonable observation – that our access to reality is mediated by language, culture and perspective – and makes an unreasonable inference from it: that truth itself is therefore plural. The unreliability of the representation doesn’t entail the unreality of the represented. The slaughterhouse mangling the sausages doesn’t imply there was no pig.
Realistic self-portraits rarely appear in academic philosophy. Ego, delusion, ‘playing the game’, ‘living the dream’, protecting the mortgage and pension – all that unrealpolitik describes the state most of us find ourselves in. Our monkey brain doesn’t just pursue truth; it evolved primarily to aid survival in a hostile environment. Say bye-bye truth, let’s live to see tomorrow. Moon landing conspiracy theories are of far more importance to many than intersectionalism, anticolonialism and CRT. These postmodern social models observe the surface confusion in specific discourses and over-generalise it. The ocean isn’t that choppy if you zoom out a little further. If you think this is somehow unique to our age, ask yourself what percentage of medieval Europeans knew the Church was pushing bold-faced rot but were too powerless to do anything about it. We could ask the same about Soviet communism. How times haven’t changed.
It’s not a pretty picture
Culture is a complex system that can be simultaneously epistemically irrational and instrumentally rational. It’s software with conflicting goals running on befogged survival-focussed brains. Open the pod bay doors, HAL. Our myopic vision mistook the map for the territory a long time ago. Today, the postmodernists are just arguing over the typeface. The grand ambitions of the activist-utopians hide a simple question: do we have the mental architecture to build anything better, given how our attempts frequently produce much worse? Perhaps we are already operating at our hard limit.
While academia is occupied with the epistemic horizon, the cognitive one is far more worrying. The cleverest organisational design or the grandest utopian vision still must pass through Karen in HR. The activist sub-culture’s inadvertent contribution has been demonstrating how wildfire groupthink infects already inadequate institutions. Much like 1984, Discipline and Punish was meant to be a warning and not a guide.
So, all those words, those gender studies theses and all that queering add up to more cognitive distortion. The HR applications of academic thinking have again amounted to another failed utopian vision. This project may have taught us nothing about reason but has deepened our understanding of how our psychology fails our institutions. One big lie. We’re not in a new Dark Age; we never left the original. We’re certainly not post-truth. Collectively and historically, aligning our thinking and our evidence has never been one of our strengths.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote of the horror of waking up to find your graduating class running your country. Imagine a world built by such petty people and then open your eyes. We’ve got bigger problems than Derrida for Beginners.
Lee Russell Wilkes 