Disagreeable Truths

Nick Gillespie from the April 1996 issue

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In a related way, Cheney is often in a rush to link every contemporary trend she abhors to postmodernism's insidious influence. The last few pages of Telling the Truth, for instance, are a dizzying whirlwind of innuendo and invective, especially when she invokes the brutal 1994 murder of a Philadelphia ice cream vendor as the necessary terminus of postmodern thought. After a young thug shot the vendor in an attempted ro bbery, a crowd of teenage onlookers laughed and danced as the vendor lay dying in the street.

Writes Cheney, "People who behave this way have obviously become desensitized to violence, probably because they have seen so much of it. Columnist Bob Greene suggests that their insensitivity reveals a contemporary confusion of entertainment and reality. 'We [have] increasingly become a nation of citizens who watch any thing and everything as if it is all a show,' he writes."

Cheney's linkage is implicit and unconvincing: Postmodernism leads to murder and mayhem. "People who laugh at a dying man have no sense that a stranger can suffer just as they do," continues Cheney. "They have lost the animating perception of compassion, the awareness, as Josiah Royce described it, that another person is 'just as real...as actual, as concrete, as thou art'....It is...evident that intellectual elites do no one a favor by sending throu gh society messages that there is no external reality in which we all participate, that there is only the game of the moment, the entertainment of the day."

This sort of logic strikes me as muddled, tenuous, and tendentious. In her comments on Foucault, say, Cheney does an admirable close reading and carefully teases out implications; here, she merely substitutes assertion for argumentation. She knows nothing for sure about why those disturbing, laughing onlookers acted the way they did--or whether they are representative of American culture or postmodernism's influence on our society. Indeed, far from eschewing compassion and awareness for others, much of what goes under the rubric of postmodern thought explicitly attempts to (and often does) shed light on the history and experience of marginal groups and individuals.

Similarly, postmodern theorists aren't playing "games" and "entertainments" in any trivial or careless way. They too are searching for the "truth"--even if their truth is precisely that there is no truth. Even as execrable a legal theorist as Catharine MacKinnon thinks she is accurately describing the objective world when, as Cheney summarizes, she claims, "that men define reality." When Foucaldians stress that all social arrangements reflect power relations, they think (rightly or wrongly) they are getting at the truth.

Cheney also mixes up "truths" that are demonstrably false (such as the Liberatorsfilm) with ones she dislikes or disagrees with (Foucault's lionization of Pierre Riviere). And she consistently conflates philosophical skepticism with extreme relativism. "Nor should we bow down to heavyhanded assertions about how there is no objectivity and thus no way to judge whether one way of doing a thing, be it educating the young or choosing a leader, is better or worse than any other," she writes. While it is true that most postmodernists (however defined) would agree that full objectivity is impossible to achieve, the second part of her statement hardly follows. In fact, Cheney's own book details, usually with horror, the intellectual and political prescriptions of postmodern thought. Postmodernists, just like conservatives, have their methods of evaluation and preferred agendas.

These criticisms perhaps get at the heart of the problem with Telling the Truth. Cheney has framed the issue so that there is really no way to disagree with her and still be "living in truth" (as she titles her final chapter), much less be granted equal intellectual respect. Even as she grants the quintessentially postmodern insight that "imperfect as we are, we can never hope to know [truth] fully or possess it completely," Cheney insists, "encountering postmodernists at work, we must not lose sight of how offensive their assumptions are, how condescending to those who seek knowledge." In her world, there seems to be no way to agree to disagree.

This is partly a testament to Cheney's skills as a polemicist and an indication of just how seriously she views her subject (and, to her credit, she never contemplates state control or censorship in any way, shape, or form). She is mounting her best attack in this battle of wits, and, as in any other contest, it makes sense to try to knock your opponents out of the ring altogether.

But such a strategy is somewhat troubling, too, whether utilized by right-wingers or left, conservatives or liberals, pre-modernists or post--especially in the absence of an explicit affirmation of a Voltairean social order in which the intellectual arena is open especiallyto unpopular viewpoints and ideas. After all, one of the things that Cheney and others hate about "political correctness" is that it attempts to brand dissent as unacceptable. In truth, "progress" in a liberal society comes not so much from deeming certain ideas off limits, but by letting them be debated vigorously and openly. If we cannot agree to disagree, there is indeed very little common ground left to share and very little of substance left to discuss.