Len Greski

Do we live in Postmodernity, and, if so, does that mean we need Postmodernism? Longer post. One of the very few interesting discussions in the Woke Right universe of garbage and nonsense is the above question, which we have to think about considerably. Is there a phase of societal organization that is "postmodern," and, if so, what should we do about it? Some of my departures from Woke Right thinking that are friendlier are over these questions. To be clear, two people I'm friendly with, one I'm friends with properly, namely Carl Benjamin and Mike Nayna, subscribe in degrees and ways to the descriptive hypothesis that humanity is in a postmodern era of social organization and that this is simply a bare fact of our circumstances that we must respond to. There's merit in this hypothesis, and it cannot easily be dismissed and shouldn't be discarded lightly. Their essential argument is mostly technological where it intersects with social. There was a time in the past (Modern Era) in which the techno-social circumstance permitted and even necessitated a particular approach to the authentication of claims, experts, credentials, etc., and that time has passed. Maybe it's the internet. Maybe it's social media. Maybe it was mass broadcast. Certainly, the democratization of mass broadcast as we have today marks a significant departure in our knowledge-producing and transmitting circumstances, which has incredible impacts on what and how people believe and how power flows through society by way of a "knowledge is power" sort of identification. This claim is legitimate in heavy ways, and it's not new. Certainly, Marshall McLuhan was arguing something like this 50 years ago, as were the postmodernists Jean-Francois Lyotard a hair later and Jean Baudrillard just after that. One could argue that Edward Bernays identified the turn long before, though that's somewhat debatable. The questions are what it means about society and how we interact in it, and what we should do about it. The answers Lyotard and Baudrillard gave are slightly different but generally the same. They represent (Left) postmodernism. Michel Foucault, another arch-postmodernist, fits in their vein as well, especially his truly trenchant critiques of biopower/biopolitics. These guys were generally mostly hopeless about fixing the problem, as (Left) postmodernists tend to be, and they didn't offer anything like a constructive path for dealing with the general loss of being able to authenticate "the real" to people in a broadly cohesive way that generates general social consensus. That rather glib despair shot through with nihilism is where the (Left) postmodernists more or less left off. If nothing is true, or at least nothing can be authenticated as true, or at the very least nothing can be communicated reliably as true and believed as such roughly universally across a society, then we're doomed to live in a space of competing localized narratives shared by groups jockeying for the political power to get people to believe them. If almost everything we believe is at best an image of the truth, not the truth, then on a particular level we must be nihilistically detached and perversely ironic (and sardonic) about more or less everything and just see how things go as we go with them. If the thesis is correct and we do actually occupy a "postmodern condition" like the above, the (Left) postmodernists left an enormous vacuum in the space where people actually have to live life. If that's our condition, there's a huge problem with their vapid non-solution: simply, people still have to do stuff. That leaves open a door to a kind of "Right" postmodernism that's the thesis on the table and, as I said, one of the very, very few interesting genuine debates in the Woke Right universe. This is essentially the starting place for my friends Carl Benjamin and Mike Nayna. We do occupy postmodernity, they insist. There is no solid way to agree widely (much less universally) on truths or methods for authenticating or communicating them. Various tribes do run with "their own truths" and enforce their adherence through social, cultural, and political (if not also economic) power, which they must jockey to obtain and articulate. We must accept this fact and play on the field we actually live on. And maybe we can actually find a way to do it without the nihilism, despair, and detachment. Truths in this condition (the postmodern condition), as Nayna likes to describe them, are local to something like "denominations." The classical liberals believe this, the neoreactionaries believe that, the ethnonationalists believe this other thing, and the Woke, meaning Woke Left, still believe in their postmodern neomarxist soup of nonsense and devastation they tried to fill the gap with over the last thirty years. At the end of the day, no one can really fully authenticate anything to the satisfaction of other groups, and therefore truthiness remains local and contingent on power to impress others with it. I'm less sure about Carl Benjamin, who I've spoken with on this less than Mike Nayna, but Nayna offers few, if any, definitive solutions. The despair is still there but tinged with hope that maybe we can figure it out. Benjamin, for his part, seems to be leaning into a kind of ethnic-traditionalism as a kind of anchor, pulling off a variety of influences that must include Edmund Burke and his appeal to the epistemological weight and force of tradition. Nayna, for his part, believes the "Woke Right" crew (a term he doesn't like or accept) are the only people in the game really exploring possible solutions to the postmodern condition, aside from the Woke Lefts, who offer revealed to be nothing but toxic, mind-ruining soup that tears societies apart. This is a valid question and a site of real debate. Social media, especially now that mass broadcast is available to anyone with a smartphone or tablet, puts us in a fundamentally different condition so far as knowing and information exchange, thus belief, goes. AI and its capacity to produce fakes will massively accelerate that liquidized "truths" space. This is a real problem, and it's not clear (a) what the solutions are, (b) that there are solutions, or (c) that the solutions of the past (e.g., classical liberalisms knowledge systems) are adequate or even appropriate to the new condition. What should we do if that is the right read on things? On the other hand, the issue is the thorniest one that can possibly be: like it or not, reality still exists, is knowable, is true by definition, and coheres. It also doesn't care about anyone's politics or social power and will crush people who get it wrong not out of any kind of malice or vengeance but simply because that's what happens when you get consequential things wrong. Reality remains the thing you run into when your beliefs are false. The idea-authenticating and communicating problem is, to people like me, not systemic and fundamental, in disagreement with my friends Carl and Mike. It is surmountable, though I don't claim to know how and admit that it may well be close to intractable, especially by design. (I hold out that out of necessity, it is likely that highly functional emergent solutions will come about even if we don't "think of" them.) To me, the truth still matters, is not completely lost, and is actually capable of being persuasive, even in a near-saturated propaganda environment because (a) there are consequences to being wrong that are unavoidable eventually, (b) the truth has a funny way of coming out over time anyway even when it doesn't assert itself through tragic consequences, and (c) reality, being true and coherent by definition, can be glimpsed through the "desert of the real" by virtue of its necessarily flawless (not merely rationalized-good) level of coherence. [I don't care what's happening at the quantum level, and, no, it doesn't f--king mater here.] Anyway, this is a real debate in Woke Right space. Skip the neofascist bullshit and Jew hate and engage in it if you want to do something actually interesting and productive in the space.

If you’re lucky, history remembers you as a salad