Mick Hartley

An interesting article – or rather, text of a talk – from Helen Pluckrose, in defence of the enlightenment against a “deeply regressive” postmodernism. An extract:

For a long time, counter-Enlightenment forces came primarily from the reactionary right — traditionalists who wanted to hold on to faith and tradition-based ways of knowing. We might call them the pre-modernists: those who want to turn the clock back to a time before all of this happened and inhabit a fantasy world that never existed.

Left-wing intellectuals and progressives were, mostly, the defenders of the Enlightenment. Marxists tried — wrongly, and sometimes catastrophically — to be scientific. They were modernists. It has been said that Marxists are wrong while postmodernists are not even wrong. They refute the epistemic criteria by which things can be wrong.

Or rather, they attempt to refute the epistemic criteria. The attempt fails. They deny the epistemic criteria by which things can be wrong.

To support liberalism, science, empiricism, and rationalism is, in one very fundamental sense, to be progressive. It is to wish to see progress in knowledge, ethics, and individual liberty as something to strive for. It is also conservative in that it seeks to conserve the epistemology and principles that enable that. Progressives on the left who embraced postmodernism should now be recognised as deeply regressive. It is not progressive to argue, as postmodern postcolonial scholars do, that science and reason are ways of knowing that belong to white, Western men, while black and brown people from the East have their own ways of knowing rooted in storytelling, myth, tradition, and superstition. That is a colonialist narrative that empirical and liberal ways of knowing were making genuine progress in overcoming. Nor is it progressive to argue that having a work ethic, being literate, and arriving on time are white cultural impositions that should not be expected of black people, as some alleged anti-racists have indeed argued. Nor is it progressive when queer theory activists proclaim that anyone who is feminine is a woman — a direct inversion of the ‘women must be feminine’ essentialism they claimed to be dismantling.