Post-modernism laid the groundwork for an ‘I have my facts and you have yours’ culture.
I feel like this is a common regressive take. The Right/anti intellectualist movement understood postmodernism as giving them the right to claim that facts don’t matter.
Post modernism itself is a way of interrogating frameworks we take for granted. It’s not saying “facts don’t matter,” it’s saying “how do we know those are facts”? There are valid questions to ask about science as a way of knowing - which epistemological frameworks we take at face value, and if we really can. Lolita is a postmodernist work, because it’s asking you to interrogate what a novel means (in the context of an unreliable narrator - HH is lying to you, but he isn’t real. what does that mean about what is being described in a novel? Is a novel a window into a different universe which has a reality to be described?)
The Right’s unreality is more of a Romantic one - none of those fuckers are reading Derrida or Deleuze. It’s more reality to sexual insecurities and the death drive. I’m not a Freudian but I look at anti intellectuals and see deep sexual confusion and fear. If “male” and “female” are permeable categories, how does someone who defines their existence solely by their white masculinity going to police the boundaries of their own identity?
orcrist@lemm.ee 1 week ago
I don’t think postmodernism had much to do with it. Go ask your average MAGA racist if they even know what that term means and they’ll shrug their shoulders. Similarly, the research does not show that your echo chamber theory holds water, and in fact it suggests the opposite. In the days before the world wide web, people were actually stuck in echo chambers, that being the communities where they lived.
postmateDumbass@lemmy.world 1 week ago
It’s not that the MAGA voter is debating merits of intelectual movements, but a change in mindsets.
the shift from philosophers wondering “why are we here?” to “doesn’t matter why, what do we do now?” removed a sense of duty or obligation to less individualistic moralities drom the way people thought.
andros_rex@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Which contemporary philosophers demonstrate this supposed shift in thinking?
GaMEChld@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Hmm, we’ve lost our philosophical heart. Interesting. I feel like I knew this in my gut but couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I like the way you phrased this, I’ll have to remember it.