Postmodernism Evolved From Critique Into Dogma
What began as radical skepticism toward all grand narratives has hardened into its own grand narrative one that demands conformity while claiming to reject authority.
"This book is a story about how despair found new confidence, which then grew into the sort of firm conviction associated with religious adherence. The faith that emerged is thoroughly postmodern, which means that, rather than interpreting the world in terms of subtle spiritual forces like sin and magic, it focuses instead on subtle material forces, such as systemic bigotry, and diffuse but omnipresent systems of power and privilege." Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories
Postmodernism emerged in the 1960s as a reaction to the failures of both Enlightenment rationalism and Marxism. Thinkers like Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard rejected all metanarratives Christianity, Marxism, science, liberal democracy arguing that claims to objective truth were really just exercises of power dressed up in the language of reason. In its early form, this was genuinely destabilizing: it questioned everything, committed to nothing, and treated certainty itself as suspect.
But something strange happened over the next fifty years. As Pluckrose and Lindsay trace in Cynical Theories, postmodernism went through two mutations. First, in the late 1980s and 1990s, it became "applied postmodernism" its abstract skepticism was channeled into concrete activism through critical race theory, queer theory, and postcolonial theory. Then, around 2010, it entered its "reified" phase: the postmodern themes of systemic power, social construction, and the primacy of group identity were no longer treated as lenses to question reality but as settled truths to be enforced.
The irony is devastating. A philosophy born from the rejection of all orthodoxy has become one of the most rigid orthodoxies in modern intellectual life. It redefines common words like "racism" and "violence" into technical jargon, creating a parallel vocabulary that functions as a shibboleth. Disagreement is not met with argument but with accusations of complicity in oppression. The movement that once said "question everything" now says "questioning this makes you part of the problem."
Takeaway: Beware any intellectual movement that claims immunity from the very critique it applies to everything else radical skepticism that exempts itself from skepticism is just dogma wearing a disguise.
See also: Culture Wars Are Won Over Generations | Liberalism Contains the Seeds of Its Own Failure | The Left-Right Spectrum Obscures More Than It Reveals