Chapter 8:16P The Postmodern Deconstructionist Movement

While showing interest only in those who were suffering was extremely dishonest and dangerous, from the perspective of the do-good, feel-good, politically correct supporter, gaining relief from guilt/​depression/​the agony of the human condition was all that mattered—when the truth is killing you, you have no qualms about escaping it—and so to help ensure no subversive questioning could creep in and undermine this strategy, a philosophical justification for truthlessness was bolted on to the politically correct culture. This was Postmodern Deconstructionism, ‘a bewilderingly complex school of continental philosophy, or pseudo-philosophy’ of ‘intellectual assumptions—[that] truth is a matter of opinion, there is no real world outside of language and hence no facts independent of our descriptions of them’ (Luke Slattery, The Australian, 23 Jul. 2005). While language is artificial it nevertheless models a real world, so to say that just because language is artificial there can be no universal truths is ridiculous, but again, when the need to escape the truth becomes desperate, any excuse will do; just baffle the world, and yourself, with intellectual baloney, such as this from Jacques Derrida, one of the high priests of deconstructionism, who gave this highly intellectual (instinct/​soul/​truth-less) description of why truth supposedly doesn’t exist: ‘Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written, as a small or large unity, can be cited, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion. This does not suppose that the mark is valid outside its context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center of absolute anchoring’ (Margins of Philosophy, 1982, p.320 of 330).

In his 2001 book, The Liar’s Tale: A History of Falsehood, Jeremy Campbell described ‘postmodern theory’ as having elevated ‘lying to the status of an art and neutralised untruth’. It ‘neutralised untruth’, made what’s not true non-existent, because by denying the existence of the variously embattled and upset states of individuals, ‘races’, genders, ages, generations, countries, civilisations and cultures, it made any discussion of such differences—any pursuit of insight into the human condition—impossible. Recall how the politically correct culture deemed the children’s nursery rhyme Baa Baa Black Sheep racist, insisting it be recited as ‘Baa Baa Rainbow Sheep’? Well, the 1994 postmodernist teaching guide From Picture Book To Literary Theory similarly argued that school children shouldn’t be read stories about witches on broomsticks because they were sexist for ‘narrowly defining women’s roles’, or the Three Little Pigs fairy tale on the basis of its elitist promotion of ‘the virtues of property ownership and the safety of the private domain which are key elements of capitalist ideology’!

With levels of upset in people becoming extreme and the associated levels of guilt and self-loathing becoming unbearable for ever increasing numbers of people, hunting for opportunities to be ‘idealistic’ and feel that rush of relief from doing ‘good’ and feeling you were a good person at last, became all-consuming, to the point of ridiculously dangerous irresponsibility. The American columnist Ann Coulter described how ‘Whenever the nation [the USA] is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy. This is their essence’ (TIME, 27 Sep. 2004), while a former US presidential advisor, Karl Rove, presented this similar observation: ‘Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to…​offer therapy and understanding for our attackers’ (The New York Times, 24 Jun. 2005).

Pseudo idealistic, politically correct, postmodern, left-wing ‘compassion junkies’—empowered by their own self-righteousness and the right-wing’s inability to defend itself—were taking over almost everywhere. Drawn together by their shared overwhelming need to find and promote causes through which to feel ‘good’ they hijacked such influential institutions as the national public broadcasters in the UK and Australia—bodies that are supposed to represent all of its constituents, not one extreme faction. As a former British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) correspondent, Robin Aitken, said, ‘[I] could not raise a cricket team of Tories [right-wing conservatives] among BBC staff’ (The Australian, 10 Oct. 2005). The British journalist Melanie Phillips similarly observed that ‘With a few honourable exceptions, the BBC views every issue through the prism of left-wing, secular, anti-Western thinking’ (Daily Mail, 16 May 2005). A blogger posted this alarm: ‘The broadcasters particularly in the BBC are…​acting like the militant wing of the Labour Party. They have completely lost all restraint and integrity. They are completely out of order…​[it’s] a national outrage…​[that they] are allowed to control the most influential power centre in the history of mankind. The BBC is run by an extreme, unrepresentative and unelected cυlt. The Left have finally ruined the BBC…​The BBC is now irreparably infiltrated and broken…​All responses to the Tories are to give the impression that whatever the Tories say, do or propose is immoral or incompetent, or imply that selfish, self-serving or somehow bad motives are the real reason for them—that they are not proposed altruistically for the genuine benefit of the country and therefore cannot be a credible alternative to what is being done by Labour, who are altruistic’ (‘How the Left have corrupted broadcast news’, 1 Feb. 2010; see <www.wtmsources.com/124>). Almost every program on Australia’s national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), is now either outrightly dedicated to, or at least heavily skewed in its presentation towards servicing the needs of relief-hunters; in fact, its blatant bias has become something of a national joke. These national broadcasters serve no purpose now other than as places for the overly exhausted to find relief from their exhaustion. Neither the national interest nor humanity’s are of any concern, even though the illusion is that these are their only interests.

And the problem of pseudo idealism in the media has not been confined to the national broadcasters. A 2005 UCLA-led study into the political leanings of media in the US revealed that ‘almost all major media outlets tilt to the left…​there is quantifiable and significant bias’ (‘Media Bias Is Real, Finds UCLA Political Scientist’, UCLA News, 14 Dec. 2005). But at least some are protesting; in 2010 it was reported that ‘Four billboard trucks bearing the message “Stop the Liberal Bias, Tell the Truth!” began circling the Manhattan headquarters of ABC, CBS, NBC and the New York Times’ (‘Trucks Encircle ABC, CBS, NBC, Challenge “Liberal” Media to “Tell The Truth”’, CNSnews.com, 4 Oct. 2010; see <www.wtmsources.com/142>).

Much of academia, the supposed home of higher learning, has also been hijacked by overly upset, guilt-escaping, human-condition-avoiding, truth-hating relief-hunters, with a ‘comprehensive’ survey undertaken in 2005 by political science professors at the University of Toronto revealing that ‘87 percent’ of the teaching faculty ‘at the most elite’ ‘American universities’ were ‘left-wing’ ‘liberal’. A co-author of the study, Professor Robert Lichter, commented that ‘What’s most striking is how few conservatives there are in any field [of study in US universities]…​It’s a very homogenous environment’ (‘College Faculties A Most Liberal Lot, Study Finds’, The Washington Post, 29 Mar. 2005). That ‘87 percent’ of teachers in the major American centres of learning held a distinct bias of thought was certainly a ‘most striking’—indeed, truly frightening—statistic. The literary scholar Harold Bloom recognised the danger of this hijacking of academia by truth-hating relief-hunters in his 1994 book, The Western Canon, which, as a TIME magazine review summarised, asserted that a ‘rebellion in U.S. schools against Dead White European Male authors’ (or ‘D.W.E.Ms’) would lead to ‘the end of civilization’ through a ‘triumph of the forces of darkness’ (10 Oct. 1994). In The Western Canon, Bloom lamented that ‘Batman comics…will replace Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth’ (p.485 of 560). But with the human condition now explained and the truth about humans finally revealed, we can see who was doing the critical deeper thinking needed to liberate humanity from ignorance, for if you go through this book and write down the names of all the authors of the quotes used to evidence these human-race-saving insights into our species’ condition, you will find that ‘Dead White European Male’s saved the human race! Yes, the truth is that the ‘Dead White European Male’-led ‘rise of the West is, quite simply, the pre-eminent historical phenomenon of the second half of the second millennium after Christ. It is the story at the very heart of modern history’ (Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest, 2012, p.18 of 432).

A 2006 article in The Australian newspaper reported that Australia’s then Prime Minister, John Howard, ‘believes the postmodern literature being taught in schools is “rubbish”…​accusing state education authorities of “dumbing down” the English syllabus and succumbing to political correctness. [He said] “I feel very, very strongly about [this situation where]…​traditional texts, are treated no differently from pop cultural commentary”’ (21 Apr. 2006). In the article, Howard, Australia’s greatest ever Prime Minister (in my view), also referred to postmodern discourse as meaningless ‘gobbledegook’. The article said Howard’s comments were in response to the dismissal of great literature as being elitist, sexist and racist, with a leading Sydney private school having ‘asked students to interpret Othello from Marxist, feminist and racial perspectives’. The real subject students should be asked to ‘interpret’ is how artificial and dishonest pseudo idealism is and how it is threatening to condemn humanity to extinction.

In his insightfully titled 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind, the political scientist Allan Bloom also wrote of the devastating effects of postmodern, so-called ‘deconstructionist’ teaching in American universities. As summarised in this review published in The Australian newspaper: ‘we are producing a race of moral illiterates, who have never asked the great questions of good and evil, or truth and beauty, who have indeed no idea that such questions even could be asked…​As Mr Bloom says…“deprived of literary guidance they [students] no longer have any image of a perfect soul, and hence do not long to have one. They do not even imagine that there is such a thing”…​If the classics are studied at all in the universities they are studied as curiosities in the humanities departments, not as vital centres of the liberal tradition, and not as texts offering profound insight into the human condition’ (Greg Sheridan, ‘The Closing of Our Minds’, 25 Jul. 1987). Of course, the whole point of the postmodern movement was to avoid ‘the great questions’ about our ‘soul’ and what has happened to it, namely the question of our self-corruption and alienation, the issue of ‘good and evil’, ‘the human condition’, ‘truth’. The object was to stop thinking, stop the pain of guilt, bring about a ‘closing of the…mind’, ‘dumb’ the mind ‘down’. The deeper, fundamental and true objective of education is to enlighten us about the underlying issue in all of human life of the human condition, and that is precisely what literature that has historically been considered great has managed to do. While not overly confronting us with our upset, corrupted, fallen condition the great writers of our time have, through great literary skill and device, managed to throw light on it. But it is precisely that great gift that postmodernism found a way to destroy. The character Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s great/​classic 1902 book ‘Heart of Darkness [of our condition]’ acknowledged ‘The horror! The horror! [of our massively upset condition]’, but, of course, for the politically correct postmodernist this was a despicable ‘D.W.E.M.’-written piece that propagated male chauvinism, elitism, racism and aggression.

Not so long ago, HRH King Charles III (whose mentor or main influence in his philosophical life was, like mine, Sir Laurens van der Post, and who also attended Geelong Grammar School where, like me, he benefited from the influence of Sir James Darling’s soul-rather-than-intellect-emphasising, Platonic education system) wrote a letter of deep concern to the Lord Chancellor of Great Britain, questioning the extreme bias that is now also apparent in legal thinking, stating that ‘The Human Rights Act is only about the rights of individuals. I am unable to find a list of social responsibilities attached to it and this betrays a fundamental distortion in social and legal thinking’ (The Australian, 27 Sep. 2002).

Dr William Anderson, a professor of economics in the US, similarly observed that ‘Justice pretty much is dead in the United States…​Like so many other trends, this one has its intellectual underpinnings in that academic refuse pile we call Post-Modernism…​a line of thinking that denies any possibility of Truth, and is the dominant “guiding light”—darkness?—in academe these days…​right now, the post-modernists are winning battle after battle. It is one thing when post-modern nonsense dominates a history or English class; it is quite another when it becomes the bedrock of modern law’ (‘Post-Modern Prosecutions’, 25 Nov. 2006; see <www.wtmsources.com/115>).

The American lawyer Gary Saalman also wrote that ‘In recent years…postmodernism has risen to the forefront of legal theory. Postmodern theorists…​claim the law cannot have any foundation because there is no foundation for objective knowledge of any kind…Principles of law could never reflect universal truths, they argue…​According to these scholars, it is senseless to talk about whether a law is right or wrong or moral or amoral…​most observers agree that postmodern theories of law are exerting a huge influence today in the courtroom and the legislature…​Remember, these are not a lunatic fringe at the margins of legal practice. They include department heads, and leading professors of law schools…​practicing lawyers and legal authorities’ (‘Postmodernism and You: Law’, 1996; see <www.wtmsources.com/109>).

And, in his 2006 book, Understanding the Times: The Collision of Today’s Competing Worldviews, the American religious leader Dr David Noebel had this to say about the dangers of postmodernism: ‘Harold J. Berman, former professor of law at Harvard Law School…​explains that today…​foundational beliefs are rapidly disappearing, not only from the minds of philosophers, but from “the minds of lawmakers, judges, lawyers, law teachers…​the historical soil of the Western legal tradition is being washed away in the twentieth century, and the tradition itself is threatened to collapse”…​Postmodernists are intent on eliminating religious roots and transcendent qualities from Western law. They desire more fragmentation and subjectivity, and less objective morality than the Judeo-Christian tradition demands. In the end, they are intent on creating and using their own brand of social justice merely for left-wing political purposes’ (‘Postmodern Law’; see <www.wtmsources.com/121>).

The media, our centres of education and learning, the judiciary—these are all pillars of society that are being white-anted in the march toward terminal alienation. The world is in jeopardy of being completely hijacked by those who are no longer concerned with humanity’s heroic journey to enlightenment and who only want to escape the depressing effects of their human condition. Total self-preoccupation, selfishness disguised as selflessness, has arrived. Terminal levels of alienation are upon us.

I should mention that in 2014 a new level of escapism from the issue of the human condition, and with it a new level of abandonment of humanity’s heroic journey to enlightenment, emerged with the development of ‘Empathetic Correctness’. An article in The Atlantic titled ‘“Empathetically Correct” Is the New Politically Correct’ reported that in ‘college classrooms’ there is ‘a troubling trend toward protecting people from their own individual sensitivities’, and referred to students who are ‘refusing to read texts that challenge their own personal comfort’, and to a ‘number of campuses proposing that so-called “trigger warnings” be placed on syllabi in courses using texts or films containing material that might “trigger” discomfort for students’, ‘so that students can read only portions of a book with which they are fully comfortable’, or even ‘miss classes containing such [challenging] material without a grade penalty’ (23 May 2015). Truly, the doors of the human mind ARE closing. Thinking has become TOO terrifying. Terminal alienation IS upon us.

Yes, with its supposedly underpinning postmodern deconstructionist philosophy, the politically correct movement is a pure form of freedom-denying dogma that fabricated, demanded and imposed ideality or ‘correctness’, specifically that of an undifferentiated world, in complete denial of the reality of the underlying issue of the existence of and reasons for humans’ variously embattled and upset states. It is concerned with pretending to behave ideally and by so doing deluding yourself that you are an ideal, ‘good’ person. The delusion involved is, in fact, so great the movement brazenly claims to be taking humanity beyond or ‘post’ the existing upset, embattled ‘modern’ state to a good versus evil ‘deconstructed’, ‘correct’ world when in truth it is behaving non-ideally and working against the search for the liberating understanding that will take humanity beyond the upset state to a ‘post’ present/​‘modern’ human-condition-ameliorated, good-versus-evil-reconciled and thus truly ‘deconstructed’, genuinely ‘correct’ world. The gloves are off now, the confidence of—and sheer bloody-minded anger and aggression underlying—the industry of escapist denial, delusion and non-thinking is such that it is now prepared to go the whole hog and outrageously mimic the arrival of the true world at the actual expense of any chance it had of arriving. The fact is, the postmodernist politically correct movement represents the very height of dishonesty, the most sophisticated expression of denial and delusion to have developed on Earth. The ‘forces of darkness’ articulated by Harold Bloom are certainly in ascendance. The time that Plato predicted (see par. 172), where he said there would be ‘more and more forgetting [alienation]’ until the ‘universal ruin to the world’ occurred, has arrived. Yes, terminal alienation is upon us; humanity has entered end play, a death by dogma.