Infidel, or The Ultimate Postmodernism

“And you know, of course, what the ultimate postmodernism is.”
“What’s that?”
“Pre-modernism!”
(Laughter.)

This glib exchange was uttered over the crib of a still young postmodernism between a believer and a skeptic, who called postmodernism, among other, rude, names, “merely modernism by other means” and (echoing Marx’s famous aphorism) “the farce of which modernism was the tragedy.” 
	But the skeptic has proven prophetic: after the irrationalist nihilism of the postmodernists, snide, ironical, and grinning, a far more serious form of irrationalism has come to dominate - authoritarian, blood-thirsty, and suicidal - a wave of religious fundamentalisms, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, even Hindu, that are now carrying or threatening turmoil to much of our world, with ourselves often the center and target.
	What postmodernist attackers of reason, such as Derrida and Foucault, have failed to recognize is that respect for reason is, and has been since the example of Socrates, freedom’s, and the individual’s, strongest moral support against abuses of power. And they have forgotten one of the essential lessons of the late, unlamented 20th century: that irrationalism has no defense against - when it does not lead actively to - authoritarianism, fascism, and other forms of tyranny. 
	Postmodernism is a slippery term. It has been applied to architecture to describe the work of people like Robert Venturi and Michael Graves against the modernism of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. It has been used to describe the rise of Pop and conceptual art after the heroic decades of the “modernism” of artists from Picasso to the Constructivists to De Stijl to Surrealism - and so really means the exploitation of certain strands of modern art, such as Dada, at the expense of others: if anything, this “postmodernism” means, paradoxically, the triumph of modernism. And it has been tagged to describe the collapse of generally agreed critical distinctions between high and popular culture, indeed of “privileging” of any kind, though this is disingenuous: when you value, prefer, or recommend the “nonprivileging,” you are, unhappily, still privileging.
	In a more general sense, however, postmodernism is now applied by social and political scholars to a turn, as they see it, away from the valuing of reason, with its dependence on universals, as a moral and political principle and as an adequate means for understanding, and molding, the world and ourselves in the world. It is used to describe the contemporary attack on (universalist) reason, a preference of the particular to the universal, and a resulting valorization – indeed, privileging - of the nonrational, or irrational. And this turn, far from being exclusively contemporary, is understood as in fact rooted in supposedly “logocentric” Western ways of thought going back to the Sophists and Pyrrho, the nominalism of Abelard, the skepticism of Hume, the radical epistemological limits set to human reason by Kant, and the further attack on reason and the thesis of the will to power of Nietzsche, supported by the dominance psychology of Adler and the irrationalist psychology of Freud, to say nothing of the subjectivist theory of economic value of the Austrian School and such economists as Ludwig von Mies and the triumphant neoliberalism of von Hayek and his unexpected disciple, Margaret Thatcher.
	A formidable array. And who on the other side has fought for the power of reason, with its universalist assumptions, to solve human problems? This is where the argument becomes interesting: there are in fact several, all of which had enormous social and economic impact, but only one of which had an equally enormous political one. Science, the particularist, empiricist, nonrationalist approach par excellence, subverted into a universalist rationalism by its concubine mathematics, and aided and abetted by its Frankenstein monster with the heart of gold, technology - and Marxism. And only one of these attempted, if with questionable success, to apply the lessons of reason to the human polity as a whole, and that was Marxism.
	And we know - or rather, we think we know - what happened to that.
	Result: we have been left, East and West, with an irrational politics, culture, and economy and a rationalist-with-a-vengeance science and technology to, together, dominate our lives. There, the ayatollah with the cell phone, the mujaheddin on the Internet, and the suicide bomber on the camcorder; here, the corporation pauperizing its employees to fatten its share price, the neocon bleeding the government to binge the super-rich, the hacker attacking the Web with ever-more-cunning cybervermin, the federal fanatic bent on world domination and describing how he means to do it on his website: scrupulously rational methods with momentously irrational ends.
	The future meets the past, and the postmodern ironist meets his image, his match, his mate, in the fanatic, the plutocrat, the cybervandal, the junta. With a terrorist peering past their necks. Welcome to the postpostmodern world.											The Editors