Had to flip it

As you can see, I changed the blog theme. The previous one was a bit boring and blah.

When journalists attempt philosophy…

…disastrous consequences are likely.

No dis to journalists but come on, leave the theorizing to the professionals. JK JK….sorta. I ran across at Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish one of the worst attempts to use postmodernism in an op-ed column. Now, mind you, most professional academics have no idea about postmodernism but Jonah Goldberg, in his column for USAToday yesterday, argues that Obama is a postmodernist.

First, let’s see how Goldberg defines postmodernism:

“PoMos” hold that there is no such thing as capital-T “Truth.” There are only lower-case “truths.” Our traditional understandings of right and wrong, true and false, are really just ways for those Pernicious Pale Patriarchs to keep the Coalition of the Oppressed in their place. In the PoMo’s telling, reality is “socially constructed.” And so the PoMos seek to tear down everything that “privileges” the powerful over the powerless and to replace it with new truths more to their liking.

As an avid reader of philosophy and someone who has written about the very authors who are so-called postmodernists, this is more than a bit unfair. He is right that postmodern thought does disavow a capital-T truth. This is a legitimate characterization but to suggest that postmodernists believe reality is “socially constructed” is mistaken. Social constructionism, in fact, was the object of critique for postmodernism. Social constructionism developed out of a line of thought called phenomenology, which is rooted in understanding reality through human consciousness. Postmodernism, if we can even call something that, critiqued consciousness as the means to understand reality. This was done in many ways, but especially through Freud, who, as we remember, told us, not in so many words, consciousness schmonsciousness.

So let’s peep what Goldberg has to say about postmodernism and Obama :

Obama gives every indication of having evolved from this intellectual soup. As a student and, later, a law school instructor, Obama was sympathetic to Critical Race Theory, a wholly owned franchise of postmodernism. At Harvard, Obama revered Derrick Bell, a controversial black law professor who preferred personally defined literary truths over old-fashioned literal truth. Words are power, Bell and Co. argued, and your so-called facts are merely myths of the white power structure.

See, I don’t even know what to say to this because it’s not even about postmodernism anymore or philosophy. Instead, Goldberg decides to delve into biographical details about where and when Obama would have encountered Critical Race Theory, which according to Goldberg’s rather unusual intellectual history, is a “franchise of postmodernism.” So let’s recap Goldberg’s argument: Obama is a postmodernist because he liked the work of Derrick Bell, and Bell supposedly likes postmodernism. This kind of logic would not pass in an undergraduate essay nevertheless in a philosophical exegesis. You cannot make a philosophical argument by bringing in biography. Even the best literary biographers–Arnold Rampersad and Jerry Watts–are careful not to mix various developments in the life and work too haphazardly.

Here’s more:

We’re told that Obama is “post-racial,” but he invokes his own race whenever convenient (e.g., to suggest his opponents are racists, to win support of people who want to vote for him on account of his race). Indeed, the very idea that Obama is post-racial is postmodern claptrap, since only a black candidate can be post-racial, right? No one would say John McCain transcends race. If being post-racial is something only a (liberal) black politician can do, what is “post” about it? Post-racial is just another convenient term used to advance a left-wing agenda under the guise of some highfalutin buzzwords.

I may be wrong but I’m not sure if Obama or his campaign ever used the word “post-racial.” To my understanding, it is a buzzword that has been perpetuated by cable news media wrongly. I mean that because while white media pundit X talks about Obama’s “post-racial” status, they also in the next breath discuss how “race” might be playing a role in the voting practices of Americans. Let’s get one thing straight: race DOES play a big role in the campaign. In fact the whole thing is dripping with racial discourse, albeit implicitly. The fact that Obama was having trouble “connecting” with “white, working class” was basically another way of saying those white people will not vote for him because he is black. As much hedging and explaining media pundits want to do, this is the bottom line. Punto.

But back to what’s got Goldberg’s underwear in bunch. It’s not that Obama is “post-racial” or “post-modern” but that Obama is BI-racial. As you can see from the last quote, Goldberg takes aim at Obama’s ability to be both “white” and “black,” and do it legitimately since Obama is, as he likes to remind us, from Kansas and Kenya. Goldberg is using post-modernism as a proxy for the legitimate ability of Obama to claim both black and white racial identity. This is for Goldberg too much mixing, too much uncertainty. In the words of one George Costanza, “WORLDS ARE COLLIDING!!!!” This scares people like Goldberg who are afraid of anything that does not adhere to the socially dominant categories such as race. And thus, like many before him, he is using “post-modernism” as a whipping boy for an issue that is altogether unrelated to late-20th century philosophy.

In the words of Andrew Sullivan, “philosophy is easy when you know nothing about it, isn’t it?” LOL.