Socialism & Postmodernism For Dummies - Stephen Hicks

Modern Wisdom's host opens episode 171 with an admission rather than a thesis. He says he has spent years watching the words "postmodernism" and "socialism" circulate online, and that he still cannot say what either one actually commits you to: "I haven't got a clue what the underpinnings of them are." The framing is deliberately ordinary. Most political argument, he suggests, runs on borrowed definitions — you hear a phrase, silently install a meaning, and carry on. Stephen Hicks, a philosopher who works on the history of philosophy, is brought in to supply the missing definitions, and the episode's first third is essentially a lesson in how to define a contested abstraction without pretending the contest has gone away.

Hicks's method is decomposition. He grants that "All of those are high level abstractions," and that a smart species compresses enormous amounts of information about a complicated world into such labels. The same difficulty arises with liberalism, conservatism, Christianity or Islam; a definition is the output of work, not a starting point. So he takes the label apart: "post" means after or replacement, which forces the question of what modernism is being replaced. Because he writes history of philosophy, he uses the term the way philosophers and historians do — roughly the last five hundred years, above all in the Western world — and he justifies the dating by pointing to a single generation: Columbus crossing the ocean, the High Renaissance, Vesalius publishing anatomy, Luther beginning the Reformation.

It's Copernicus coming up with the idea of the sun being at the center of the system instead of the earth.

That list matters to the argument, because it establishes that "modern" is not a mood but a bundle of simultaneous revolutions — in art, anatomy, astronomy, religion, and eventually in politics and economics. Only once that bundle is on the table can the postmodern claim be stated precisely. The claim, as Hicks reconstructs it, has two layers. The descriptive layer says the revolutionary sequence is over and must be surpassed. The normative layer is stronger: most postmodernists hold that "we think the modern world has been a mistake", or that these revolutions produced pathological results and society must now be turned in another direction.

Hicks then runs through what he says follows from that verdict. Capitalism replaced feudalism; democratic republican politics replaced feudalism; both are declared fundamentally flawed, and he concludes that "all of the leading postmodernists will be anti-democratic Republican." Science and technology are treated as dangers, or reduced to a standpoint — "science is just a male way of thinking or a white way of thinking" — which he reads as a racial and gender attack on the scientific project. Individualism, the substrate of rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, is rejected in favour of group identity: your race, ethnicity or sex is what constitutes you, not your choices. His summary is blunt: the postmoderns reject the whole modern package and want to replace it with something else. He names Foucault, Derrida and Rorty as the well-educated first generation taking this big-picture view of four hundred years.

Socialism is introduced as the older idea, and Hicks defines it by a priority rather than a policy: the social comes before the individual. The test he proposes is teleological. Why do we form families, teams, businesses, political units? One answer is that they exist "for the purposes of the individuals involved" — families nurture children so they can pursue their own dreams, firms coordinate people who are each building their own careers. Socialism inverts the ordering, so that when group and individual goods collide, "the individual should sacrifice or be subordinated for the sake of the group."