Very interesting piece which covers a range of reasonable perspectives. Trump is not a postmodernist but he is taking advantage of an epistemological shift postmodernism was hugely influential in producing. I argued this at the Battle of Ideas. https://conatusnews.com/academic-roots-post-truth-society/ …https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/956501201981501440 …
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Postmodernists believe that truth is socially constructed by discourses. There is no evidence that Trump believes this. However, he does seem to be constructing his own truth with his own discourse & trying, with demonstrable success to get this socially validated.
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It is true that postmodernism was defined as a scepticism to metanarratives & MAGA is a metanarrative. But so is the postmodernist overarching explanation of social constructivism by dominant discourses (power). They are just competing ones
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'For Foucault, Trump, who seeks not truth but only power. would be an extreme example of what postmodernism opposes.' Yes, but postmodernism needs to stop crediting itself with the discovery that practices &institutions claiming to be based on truth are, in fact, focused on power
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Has there ever been a time when humans were not aware of this? Hasn't propaganda on the part of rulers & the pointing out of said propaganda on the part of dissident thinkers been part of every civilisation ever?
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The arrogance & condescension of 'You need us to point out that things assumed to be true might not be' is breathtaking. Gee, thanks. It's not like we have entire cognitive structures built to produce plausible lies & others built to detect them because we've known this forever.
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“In evolutionary terms, every time a population of individuals became good at detecting these liars, the liars became better at concealing their lies…a never-ending arms race” (McNamara and Trunbull. An Evolutionary Psychology of Leader-Follower relationsp11).
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We're not concerned that postmodernists want to interrogate what is true and how we know this. That's great. You didn't invent doing this tho & we're concerned about your epistemology and how it compares with other methods like, for example, science.
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Replying to @HPluckrose
When I was in school, I read Derrida for the scepticism about meta narrative and the interrogation of truth. Perhaps I'm naive, but I don't remember relatavism, I remember learning that making good (moral) decisions first requires a period of intense questioning and uncertainty
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