Dark Bedfellows

Postmoderns and traditionalists unite against the Enlightenment

Walter Olson from the January 1999 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

Deride the "self-made man." Lasch and other antimodernist critics decry, as the defining act of the deracinated modern, the flight into "choice" and away from a dense matrix of local associations. So they tend to belittle--as "self-inventing," "narcissistic," or worse--anyone who, in Virginia Postrel's phrase, turns his back on the old neighborhood with a mind to seek new challenges and associates in a place of his own choosing. Likewise, where identity politics holds sway, the young person who defects from a particularist subculture into the wider generic American culture can expect similar abuse, even if the epithets differ ("sellout," "assimilationist," "Oreo").

Stop the globalization of culture. The borrowing of Western culture by poor countries would have thrilled the philosophes; it appalls equally Lasch and the conservative philosopher John Gray, who see it as an assault by generic modernism on traditional and authentic forms of community. The 60s-era campus left was more straightforward about what it was fighting: "Western imperialism."

Trash the concept of tolerance. Thirty years ago it was Herbert Marcuse who unmasked the idea of "tolerance" as a tool of repression by the elite. Now social conservatives, from Harvey Mansfield to Robert Knight in The Age of Consent, have learned the deconstructionist dance steps. (Mansfield: "Toleration is not neutral....If we don't keep up the standard of morality we will bring it down.")

The gradual convergence of antirationalists on the right with their pomo Doppelgängers may have sped up a little in February 1994, when First Things published--I am not making this up--a piece with warmly appreciative things to say about Michel Foucault. Rising traditionalist thinker J. Bottum, who's now books editor of The Weekly Standard, praised the Frenchman's insights and noted a "curious parallel" between the work of left-
wing icons Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Frederic Jameson and that of such
medieval thinkers as Eckhart, Cusa, and St. Bonaventure: "What believers have in common with postmoderns is a distrust of modern claims to knowledge." He proposed exploring common ground toward the joint goal of overthrowing the modern temperament, with its "scientific" and "technological" bent. He admitted the two camps still "disagree on whether God exists," but figured that little problem can be worked out after the rationalists are driven from the field.

Letters published in First Things since then confirm that other readers have been thinking along similar lines. Thus Susan Mennel of the University of New Hampshire salutes the "postmodern denial of the possibility of objective, neutral knowledge" since it "means that the appeal to some kind of objective `proof' is itself ruled out, and therefore religious arguments, which have never relied on such a standard, can be far more intellectually convincing to a contemporary audience than to earlier ones more assured of the validity of naturalistic explanation."

By now, some explicit and vocal defenses of the Enlightenment might seem in order--and in fact they are turning up here and there, as in Wilson's Consilience. Also among those pursuing the issue are some of the followers of Ayn Rand, the Enlightenment lineage of whose general position is plain enough. In October the Institute for Objectivist Studies, which has been moving lately to engage a wider intellectual audience and shed the sectarian tone often associated with Rand circles, held its annual conference in New York on the theme "The Real Culture Wars: The Enlightenment and Its Enemies." IOS Executive Director David Kelley suggests one productive step might be to stop describing the culture wars as mostly a left-right squabble when in fact at least three distinct cultures are contending with each other: the Enlightenment culture that still holds sway in much of American life, a postmodern/relativist culture with a stronghold in the universities, and a pre-Enlightenment culture that has never given up its claims to authority and is staging something of a comeback.

Who is likely to rally to the Enlightenment banner? Among the obvious candidates are scientists and technologists, who know from their daily experience that the material facts of reality cannot be arbitrarily redefined at will. (In Wilson's wry version: "Scientists, held responsible for what they say, have not found postmodernism useful.") Businesspeople as well, says Kelley, instinctively share the Enlightenment outlook, what with their common-sense grasp of material reality, their optimistic assumption that problems exist to be solved, their knowledge that scientific facts count, and the high value they place on individual achievement as something that deserves direct reward.

Another likely science-based flashpoint, Kelley believes, is today's rapid spread of anti-evolutionist ideas. Confined until only recently to a few beachheads like Tom Bethell's American Spectator column and David Klinghoffer's back-of-the-book in National Review, critiques of Darwinism are now the rage across the conservative press, even in places like Commentary and The Wall Street Journal. More--much more--friction on this issue appears to lie ahead. According to the newsletter of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, California's Ahmanson family, through its Fieldstead & Co. foundation, has donated $1.5 million to the institute's fledgling Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture
for a research and publicity program to "unseat not just Darwinism but also Darwinism's cultural legacy." Observing that "the most severe challenge to theology over the last two hundred years has been naturalism," the center proposes to "cure western culture of this unfortunate Enlightenment hangover."

Ben Franklin once said he was almost sorry he was born so soon since it meant he would not have "the happiness of knowing what will be known 100 years hence." Two centuries later, amid the undreamt-of levels of health and comfort that science has brought the West, a generation of intellectuals amuses itself in efforts to gnaw away at the Enlightenment foundations of the enterprise. Were he hooked to an underground turbine, Ben Franklin might be discovering a new way to generate electricity: spinning in his grave.

Contributing Editor Walter Olson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of The Excuse Factory: How Employment Law Is Paralyzing the American Workplace (The Free Press).

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