Justice Without Hyphens

A long read on the dead end of Post-Modern philosophy

Editorial note: The following is adapted from a lecture I gave a few years back at Yale that I never got round to revising and submitting to a journal. A couple aspects are not quite up to date, but much still stands as a useful reminder of deeper currents running under the streets of our polis right now. It’s about 4,000 words long, so settle in with a cup of coffee.

Harvard’s Harvey Mansfield said quite a long time ago that the job of modern conservatism is to save liberalism from liberals. He intended this remark no doubt with his usual combination of seriousness and ironic levity. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing Prof. Mansfield in action, you’ll know that such remarks from him are often accompanied with a mischievous grin. But my opening argument today is that in fact conservatives are the primary defenders of the liberal tradition that is under sustained attack from the far left. (I’ll treat separately the recent conservative enthusiasm for “post-liberalism.”) And mainstream liberals seem to be suffering from the intellectual equivalent of an immune system disorder, and appear unable to fight back, most of the time weakly succumbing to the far-left attack.

Given that conservatives have always been critics of liberalism, this represents—or should represent—a stunning turn of events for everyone. But consider a few of the ways in which left and right have changed places in recent times, by means of the following riddles:

—Once upon a time, back in the McCarthy era of the 1950s, it was liberals who championed free speech and academic freedom, even for unpopular causes and opinions, while the right argued that there are some intelligible limits to freedom of speech and academic freedom. More broadly, liberals in the 1950s decried what it perceived as a culture of conformity in American life. Today, the left openly attacks the principle of free speech, calling it a tool of oppression and power and imposing—on college campuses at least—an increasingly rigid culture of conformity. And suddenly it is the right that now tends to embrace the more absolutist old ACLU position on free speech.

—Or take democracy itself. Conservatives have long been skeptical and at times highly critical of democracy, for reasons that stretch back to the origins of classical political philosophy in ancient Greece. But today the centerpoint of conservative thought is satisfied with democracy as qualified by constitutional government. Today the far left is coming openly to reject democracy for a long list of reasons (despite their claims to be defending “Our Democracy^TM”, and dislikes constitutional forms that pose any impediment to their will. (“Our Democracy^TM” means “we win all the elections.”)

—It used to be that conservatives were critics of The Enlightenment—if it is still possible to speak of “The Enlightenment” with the former confidence about the 18th century and what it is said to represent. Today, The Enlightenment or its legacy is increasingly rejected by the left, and more often defended now by conservatives. In fact the left increasingly rejects a core principle of The Enlightenment tradition—reason itself.

—Conservatives used to express great skepticism about individualism, but today it is the left that increasingly rejects individualism, preferring instead to associate or determine your identity with your ethnic and class group.

—Another curious turnabout: today it is fashionable on the left to talk about how everything—gender, society, even reality itself—is “socially constructed,” that is, artificial or arbitrary, usually oppressive, and putatively unjust. What used to be called “custom”—the social conventions by which we live together—is of course variable and often arbitrary, but is there no nature—no reality—at the bottom of our variance? And the ironic thing here is that some of the earliest treatises on how social conventions shape and/or constrain our perceptions and opinions came from conservative-leaning thinkers, such as sociologist Peter Berger and the philosopher John Searle, though you can also find early forms of this argument in Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill.

—Why is the essential noun “justice” so often accompanied by a modifier, or a hyphen, today? We have social justice, environmental justice, climate justice, racial justice, feminist justice, gender justice, even spatial justice, and more. Why this conspicuous rise of contingent justice? Whatever happened to simple “justice” without a modifier?

To be sure, justice used to be understood to come in four distinct forms: distributive, procedural, restorative/correctional (or commutative), and retributive. But these ancient categories are without ideological or particular interest group slant, unlike most of the contingent justices were see today.

Maybe there is some poetic justice to be found in this conundrum?

—Why has socialism made such a surprisingly strong comeback in recent years, despite its dismal historical record, and compelling critiques of it? There has to be an explanation that goes beyond just generational ignorance and fading of historical memory.

To treat these related problems I think we need to hazard some generalizations, and generalizations are out of fashion these days.

Partly this is the natural and sensible result of the increasing specialization of intellectual and academic life, and partly it is the result of the exceptions and contradictions that always crop up in any generalizations.

Let’s start with this one: It is commonly said that “postmodernism” is the dominant outlook of our time, or of the radical left today. The term “postmodern” and its cognates such as “critical theory” have become overused and fuzzy, and as a cliché used as often as a crude battering ram rather than a conversation starter—and not just by conservatives or critics such as Jordan Peterson.

I was quite surprised a few years ago when French President Emmanuel Macron, a former socialist of sorts, told Der Spiegel magazine the following: “Post-modernism was the worst thing that could have happened to our democracy. The idea that you have to deconstruct and destroy all grand narratives is not a good one. Since then, trust has evaporated in everything and everyone.”

Whenever I take on a large body of controversial doctrine, especially one toward which I might be ill-disposed, I try to begin with the disposition Ronald Reagan once used to define an optimist. An optimist, Reagan said, is the person who, when seeing a large pile of manure, says, “There just has to be a pony in there somewhere.”

Hence when we see the piles of academic manure revealed most pungently in the series of hoax articles in various journals of “critical theory” (or “grievance studies” as the hoaxers call them), I propose that we step back and see what aspects might make sense; let’s look to see if we can find a pony.

Postmodernism has become a very diffuse term. We should try to define more precisely just what the term means. It is an “ism”? And if postmodernism is said on the surface to be “what comes after ‘modern,’” then perhaps we need to start by being clear about what we mean by “modern.”

By modern is meant more or less the turn in civilization and culture bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment. Now, there were multiple, distinct Enlightenments, just in European civilization. There was the French Enlightenment, the Scottish Enlightenment, the German Enlightenment, even an American Enlightenment.

And there are key figures one associates with Enlightenment ideas, including but certainly not limited to Locke, Hume, Smith, Rousseau, d’Alembert, Diderot, Condorcet, Montesquieu, Comte, Voltaire, Holbach, Spinoza, Vico, Kant, Hegel, and Ben Franklin, just to name a very few of the best known. It took Yale’s great historian Peter Gay two large volumes to begin to get the compass headings for The Enlightenment, and despite all of the usual caveats and distinctions that need to be made, Gay was still able to say, “The Enlightenment, then, was a single army with a single banner, with a large central corps, a right and left wing, daring scouts, and lame stragglers.”

That single banner, or the perhaps the summa of the Enlightenment disposition, was best expressed by Kant in his famous and passionate short essay, “What is Enlightenment?”, where he says: “This age is the age of enlightenment. . . . Nothing is required for this enlightenment, however, except freedom; namely, the freedom to use reason publicly in all matters.” Sometimes Kant’s outlook is labeled humanism.

The most prominent general ideas associated with the Enlightenment include a rebellion against Christianity (and the idea of revealed religion and the authority of revealed religion generally); an elevation of reason; dedication to the scientific method. It gave birth to the supercharged belief in scientifically-driven Progress, both material and philosophical.

In pure material terms, the promise of science, as Francis Bacon put it, was the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate. In philosophical terms, especially as explained by Hegel and his Progressive successors, History is heading in an intelligible direction, and that direction was freedom for the individual, under the benevolent guidance and protection of the modern state. In social affairs, positivism—empirical science applied to humans and their relations, would be the engine of social progress.

From the Enlightenment the ideas of democracy and liberal individualism achieved escape velocity; freedom was for everyone. Slavery and other forms of oppression had to go. These values were universal in scope and application. Although we’ve tended to identify the Enlightenment as primarily a European phenomenon, you can find expression of Enlightenment thought all over the world in the 18^th century, and the entire world adopted or imitated western democratic institutions, the organization and curricula of western universities, and the enthronement of science and progress.

The thinkers of the Enlightenment might be thought of as the original “critical theorists,” and regardless of the difficulties and ambiguities of nailing it down as a certain “thing,” it is unassailable that it represented a critical mass of rapidly changing perspectives on, and challenges to, the established order or inherited thought of the time.

At the time Peter Gay wrote, in the 1960s, he was most interested in contesting attacks or distortions of the Enlightenment that came from the right. Gay:

“Ever since the fulminations of Burke and the denunciations of the German Romantics, the Enlightenment has been held responsible for the evils of the modern age, and much scorn has been directed at its supposed superficial rationalism, foolish optimism, and irresponsible Utopianism.”

While conservatives have not abandoned or reversed course on their critique of the Enlightenment, today, as Steven Pinker points out in his book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, some of the most vigorous attacks on the Enlightenment and its legacy are more likely to come from the Left. (And I'll add that most of the criticism of Pinker’s book has come from the left, even though Pinker is a liberal Democrat.)

“Who could be against reason, science, humanism, and progress?”, Pinker asks. “[C]ounter-Enlightenment ideas continues to be found across a surprising range of elite cultural and intellectual movements.” Needless to say most of these elite movements are dominated by the left.

And the most important or influential of these is postmodernism.

Pinker: “[T]he postmodernist credo [is] that reason is a pretext to exert power, reality is socially constructed, and all statements are trapped in a web of self-reference and collapse into paradox.”

That is the commonplace shorthand characterization of the matter as it widely expressed today. But in looking for the pony amidst the manure, we might want to pause for a moment and ponder a few of the ways postmodern critical theory parallels or overlaps with some conservative perspectives.

I’ll give you just one superficial clue that I hope will pique your curiosity. One of the foundational texts of Frankfurt School critical theory—which is the intellectual root of postmodern critical theory—is Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno’s 1944 book, The Dialectic of Enlightenment. I am not sure these two seminal authors are much read any more—Michel Foucault seems the writer who is most in fashion and generates most attention, not to mention article citations—and that’s too bad. Although Horkheimer and Adorno’s work is dense and difficult, it is a lot more comprehensible than many of the leading postmodernist writers of more recent times, like Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, and Foucault.

Horkheimer and Adorno wrote that “the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant. . . The curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression.” It is as thoroughgoing an attack on every leading aspect of the Enlightenment as you can conceive—especially reason, science, and individualism. These early Frankfurt critical theorists—but also their most famous successors such as Foucault—thought Enlightenment rationality led directly to the totalitarian regimes of the 20^th century. Many conservative thinkers essentially believe the same thing.

Consider, for example, the work of Eric Voegelin, a contemporary of Horkheimer and Adorno who is much beloved of conservatives, and who was also an exile from Europe in the 1930s. One of Voegelin’s titles is From Enlightenment to Revolution, which one of his students (John Hallowell) summarized thus: “What starts out in the so-called Age of Enlightenment as nothing more formidable than a dream, even an absurd dream, turns out in the 20^th century to be a living nightmare.”

There are whole passages in Horkheimer and Adorno—men of the left—that you can lay side by side with Voegelin—a man of the right—and not be able to tell the difference, so much so that I’m thinking of doing a mash-up and seeing if I can get it published in some avant-garde lefty academic journal. Voegelin isn’t the only right-leaning philosopher to express profound doubts about Enlightenment reason. Leo Strauss: “I began therefore to wonder whether the self-destruction of reason was not the inevitable outcome of modern rationalism.”

As this ironic convergence suggests, it is not easy to get your hands around just what we mean when we use this commonplace phrase, “postmodern.” Don’t ask a postmodernist; as the old joke goes, what do you get when you cross a postmodernist with a Mafioso? You get an offer you can’t understand!

Adorno himself wrote: “Yet it would be a mistake to assume that we can discover the essential meaning of a word by simply asking the people who use it.” More recently philosopher Michael Lynch said “pretty much everyone admits that it is impossible to define postmodernism. This is not surprising, since the word’s popularity is largely a function of its obscurity.”

But again, to hazard some generalizations to get us started, postmodern critical theory has a few large things at its center:

—As already mentioned, a deep skepticism of the nature and reach of human reason, and of language itself. Adorno wrote: “Reason. . . is incapable of determining the ultimate aims of life and must content itself with reducing everything it encounters to a mere tool.” That refers to “nominalism.”

—Conventional notions of “objectivity” and claims of knowledge are an illusion and based on ideology, and all claims about justice are indissolubly bound up with assertions of power. This is the intellectual ground of the now popular claim that free speech is a tool of oppression; that the most essential thing in a world where we can’t speak much about essential things is power, and “power relationships.” Just to take one data point, sociologist Neil Gross’s survey research finds that nearly a third of sociologists and English professors do not believe objectivity is possible.

—What we call progress is actually regression.

—Critical theorists are against positivism and nominalism, and dislike social science almost as much as many conservatives do.

—They decry the “atomization of the individual” that the Enlightenment’s emphasis individual freedom bequeathed to us. Elevating the status of the individual makes it paradoxically easier for the powerful to control the masses. The modern distinction between the separate realms of private life and public life—between the civil society and private life—is a myth. Under the maw of ubiquitous mass culture and technocracy, individuals come to oppress themselves. This might be considered an updating of the classic Marxist doctrine of “false consciousness.” At times, though, postmodern rhetoric sounds a lot like McCarthyism at its worst­—“a conspiracy of culture so vast,” a hypothesis so protean that it is non-falsifiable.

—Antifoundationalism. Impossible to make universal claims, on behalf of justice or anything else. Grand narratives are impossible, or at the very least so highly misleading as to be useless. To be sure, language and communication have great difficulty, and multiple interpretations are typical, especially as you ascend the ladder from concrete nouns—chair, rock, window, tree, human being—to more abstract nouns: beauty, goodness, honesty, freedom, fairness, justice, truth.

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder (though actually I think that’s probably not true if we dwelled on the matter for a good long while), but is justice also in the eye of the beholder?

If objectivity is impossible, if language is subjective or corrupt or determined purely by power-relations, if common deliberation is actually not possible, then it raises a stark question: Why exactly are we having this conversation? More importantly, how are we having this conversation?

The radical skepticism of critical theory should be contrasted with old-fashioned Socratic skepticism. Socratic skepticism begins with the famous axiom, “I know that I know nothing,” which is meant to indicate a complete openness to being, a quest that begins always with the question, “What is. . .” about everything.

Postmodern skepticism evinces the exact opposite: I know that nothing can be known. Few postmodern thinkers say this directly or necessarily think this explicitly, but when you try to take in the layer upon layer of the complications critical theorists lay down in the path to understanding anything, it amounts to the same thing.

Now, it is as this point that most critics of postmodern critical theory charge it with being wholly relativist, if not purely nihilistic. This is an unfair charge in some cases—even of Foucault. And one of the most obvious things you observe about the radical left today is that they are highly moralistic. There is no relativistic doubt that racism and sexism is an evil; the moral wrongness of genocide in Darfur or Rwanda is not something that needs to be established.

To be fair, Foucault, near as I can tell, does not think there is no truth at all, or that objectivity is impossible, and that language is wholly subjective. But it is hard not to read his immense web of complications and obstacles to understanding and not simply give up. To borrow and adapt Socrates’ famous metaphor, in Foucault’s outlook the cave is so deep underground that it is nearly impossible to ascend from the darkness to see the light.

Is it possible to get to the heart of the matter, and grasp in simple terms why it is so difficult to apprehend and comprehend objective reality? If objective reality is impossible to apprehend, what takes the place of objectivity as the ground of moral and political judgment? The answer is historicism. Here we come to the crux of the matter, and the most relevant point, which is that historicism is the background noise, the intellectual muzak of our time, even among people who aren’t radical postmodernists. The point is: our ever-changing historical circumstances are so powerful and overwhelming that we simply cannot penetrate to the real mysteries of being. This is the central teaching of the most important postmodernist thinker, Martin Heidegger. We aren’t able to ask the question “What is” because it’s the wrong question. Everything is historically determined, or bounded by the historical horizon in which we live.

Hence “deconstruction” in literature—the author’s intent is unimportant because the author herself probably didn’t comprehend the ways in which her thinking was determined or limited by her historical horizon. A dominant theme in literary criticism today is that we shouldn’t “privilege the text” (or the author) in our reading. Instead we privilege ourselves and our subjective feelings. Every generation will apply its own context to all ideas and classic works of the past. Tradition of any knd has no standing. This goes a long way toward explaining the death of the humanities in our time. Why then do they matter? If there is nothing of real or lasting value to be learned from old books and once-great authors so long as they are merely a mirror to our own thoughts and prejudices, why bother with all that reading?

Now this is a tricky and subtle point that is not easy to sort out. As we know, Edmund Burke and his idea of “prescription”—that constitutions and social orders are the products of historical evolution—looks a lot like historicism. That’s one reason why Woodrow Wilson, for example, traced his own progressive politics to Hegel and Burke together, which has always seemed an odd combination.

And no reasonable person would ever deny that changing historical circumstances have a hugely powerful influence on how we think about everything, and how we think differently over time about the requirements of justice. And conservatives certainly share with postmodernists a very critical attitude toward social science.

If we admit that postmodernists are right or partially right on some questions, or overlapping with some conservative positions, is it possible to be a postmodernist conservative, or at least to find some concord with postmodernism?

Having cleared away a lot of manure, have we spotted a pony yet?

Here let me offer two further observations about postmodern theory that sharpen the difficulties of the matter.

First, to the extent that there is some common ground between conservative perspectives and postmodern perspectives, it can be explained by reference to Samuel Johnson’s famous quip about a play he reviewed, in which is said, “What is good is not original, and what is original is not good.” This applies perfectly to many core propositions of postmodernism.

The postmodern emphasis on the difficulties of language, its use as a tool of power, though cloaked in the most advanced speculations in semiotics and linguistics, resembles nothing so much as the arguments about rhetoric and its relation to justice in several of Plato’s dialogues, especially Gorgias, Phaedrus, Protagoras, and The Republic. The view that our inherited ideas of justice are just cloaks for assertions or acquisitions of power and dominance, is essentially the same argument Thrasymachus makes against Socrates in the opening of The Republic. Justice, Thrasymachus argues, is merely the interest of the stronger. Socrates makes rather quick work of him.

In other words, there isn’t much new under the postmodern sun. Some postmodern authors are aware of this, though their readings of Plato seem very simplistic and superficial.

Second, we could credit postmodern critical theory with being an authentic philosophical quest for wisdom if we didn’t have such good grounds for suspecting its ultimate political commitment.

Much of the original impetus behind the early critical theorists of the Frankfurt School 75 years ago was a reclamation project, namely, the necessity of people of leftist commitment to rescue the obvious failure of Marxist dialectical materialism. Both World War I and especially the disappointment of Soviet Communism and then Fascism, along with a worldwide economic crisis, generated a crisis for orthodox Marxism. If the means of production weren’t the driver of history, then perhaps a more capacious theory of culture and psychology could work to explain the supposed persistence of oppression and inequality. Hence the birth of critical theory.

It is a very transferrable approach to grounding radical politics in a pseudo-philosophical creed that is less susceptible to falsification by historical events the way Marxism was. It is very easy to draft off of these thick theoretical edifices and from there launch forth with “structural racism” and unconscious bias, patriarchy, consumerism, and every successive wave of radical feminism. Hence the fondness for what I’ve called “hyphenated justice”—all of the specialized identity- or cause-specific kinds of justice, such as social justice or environmental justice.

When you notice that the premise of radical egalitarianism—the premise that any observed disparity or adverse social condition is presumptively unjust with no argument to ground it and no further investigation into causes—it stands revealed to be a vast contortion to disguise or conceal that’s its real target is still capitalism and any social structure that is not a perfect egalitarian utopia—which is yet another grand unified narrative that the rest of postmodern thought denies is possible.

Just as soi dissant Marxists didn’t read Das Kapital, hardly anyone really reads Horkheimer, Adorno, Gramsci, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan etc. Most people just go in for superficial pop versions of their teachings near as I can tell.

I have proposed that the core philosophical question of conservatism is finding the unchanging ground of changing experience. Postmodernism says there is no unchanging ground: nothing is permanent.

This is a variation of Russell Kirk’s first great principle of conservatism, which he describes as the view that there is a transcendent moral order of the universe.

What does that mean? Although Edmund Burke argued that humans are fundamentally religious beings, the proposition that there is a transcendent moral order of the universe does not mean that everyone must believe in God, still less that everyone must profess a sectarian religion or even that religion must or should be the authoritative source for our opinions.

It means that there is a real structure or order to existence, and especially human existence. But a complete understanding of the wholeness of existence is inherently impossible to achieve—that’s what is meant by any understanding of “transcendence.” It requires an openness to metaphysics, which is partially beyond the grasp of reason. The mysteries of the physical universe, the subject of intense interest in advanced physics today, is matched by the mysteries of the human social universe. The conservative tradition has long pointed to the natural law as the embodiment of both the difficulties and provisional solutions to this mystery, starting with the fact that there is such a thing as human nature though it would take an entire separate treatment to begin to lay out. But the essential conservative truth is perhaps best expressed by the old line of the Roman poet Horace: You can expel nature with a pitchfork, but it will come back at you through the window. Postmodernists or their epigones are the wielders of intellectual pitchforks, making war on human nature, trying to close the window against a return.

The Enlightenment was thought to have settled decisively the long-running disputation between reason and revelation in favor of reason over revelation, with important political consequences, not least of which is the formal separation of church and state that is now prevalent in almost all western democracies. Revelation was unscientific, and therefore could not establish its authority philosophically or politically. The Enlightenment, as Thomas Jefferson put it, overthrew “monkish ignorance and superstition.”

It is said that the truth claims of religion cannot be proved by reason; exactly so—that’s why we call it “faith.” But this was not a new argument at all; the intellectual conflict between reason and revelation goes back to antiquity.

But if the order of the universe is “transcendent,” it means that we cannot hope to achieve complete and comprehensive understanding of it by reason alone.

The basic conservative critique of Enlightenment reason was that its reach exceeded its grasp: reason is insufficient to pierce fully the mysteries of the universe. There is a short phrase found frequently in the natural law tradition that expresses the riddle of origins or final foundations: “Time out of mind.”

To borrow the current language of postmodern theory, all the Enlightenment did was “privilege” reason over revelation. And what postmodern theory has done is now challenge reason itself in much the same way as revelation was challenged and rejected by the Enlightenment.

The eventual attack on reason from postmodern critical theory we see today was predicted decades ago by conservative thinkers such as Richard Weaver and C.S. Lewis—two professors of literature, coincidentally. Weaver, the author of a famously titled book Ideas Have Consequences (published in 1949), warned that “It will be found that every attack upon religion, or upon characteristic ideas inherited from religion, when its assumptions are laid bare, turns out to be an attack upon mind.”

And in his slim but indispensable 1944 book The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis anticipated the rise of postmodernism when he noticed the pure subjectivism creeping into literary interpretation: “The belief that we can invent ‘ideologies’ at pleasure, and the consequent treatment of mankind as mere specimens, preparations, begins to affect our very language.”

That is certainly what has happened with the increasingly specialized language—the thick jargon—of the critical theory left.

Lewis proposed a simple remedy: “A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.”

Why dogmatic? Because of the aforementioned reason: the limitations of reason.

But also because it is necessary to confront the nihilism of our time. Not unlike Winston Smith in 1984, insisting that two and two make four, or Lincoln, asking “If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? The answer is four, because calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it so.”

Lewis added helpfully: “It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.”

To return to the original question, after stripping away all of the manure of postmodernism, you will find the pony underneath is either an invisible unicorn, or the pony is wearing conservative colors, and is very much relieved to get out from under the pile.