A travesty of logic

One morning in late November I woke to find myself transformed, in an ideological echo of poor Gregor Samsa's metamorphosis, into a right-wing conservative. No, more than that: an enemy of democracy.

The charge was made by two postmodernist academics from Curtin University in an ill-tempered polemic titled The War on Democracy: Conservative Opinion in the Australian Press.

It was an unsettling moment. One conservative Sydney columnist who escaped a flaying in the book was visibly peeved that he'd been ignored. I on the other hand was bridling at my new-found status as one of Australia's notorious freedom bashers: my companions in arms included Janet Albrechtson, Miranda Devine and Andrew Bolt.

A lugubrious colleague who I'd never heard laugh before cackled a good minute at my misfortune before suggesting, in all seriousness, that I could use my notoriety as a pitch for a promotion.

After a few weeks of teeth-gnashing I resolved, with reservations, to ignore Steve Mickler and Niall Lucy’s tract. Curtin is a Perth university that fails to make the Jiao Tong's international ranking's top 500, so this is hardly a stellar duo. But after reading Mark Bahnisch's thoughtful post (On Line Opinion) on the book, and a number of the over-heated responses at On Line Opinion by people of Lucy and Mickler's ilk, I offer the following as an appendix to that discussion.

The thing that makes my inclusion in Lucy and Mickler's anti-democratic axis of evil profoundly anomalous is that I am not, and never have been, a conservative. Christopher Pearson, writing in The Weekend Australian, has already drawn attention to this “category mistake”. And Pearson, it's safe to say, knows a conservative when he sees one.

I've never advocated support for the Howard or Bush governments and their domestic or foreign policies; I have, on the other hand, written positively of things like the revival of anti-war political protest, and derisively of “blustery conservative pundits with a vested interest in talking up the enemy”. I am, in other words, an opponent of the political persuasion Lucy and Mickler impute to me.

A month or so after the Lucy and Mickler attack I found, for example, the opening of an article I had drafted in response to John Howard's Quadrant address, which expresses my frustration at the current rather Manichaen state of debate in Australia.

"We are entering a period of neo-conservative ideological hubris that must not go un-challenged," it began. "The academic left, whose thinking has become muddied by two decades of toadying to the fashions of postmodern theory, is largely irrelevant to the resistance. The challenge must come from a vigorous and pragmatic mainstream left. And here lies the rub: such an entity does not in any meaningful way exist. The opinion pages of the metropolitan dailies are clotted by neo-cons who discharge expensive verbiage - most are exceedingly well paid - on a sectarian war against a largely chimerical enemy: the so-called left establishment."

I appear to have been assigned to Lucy and Mickler's band of deviant conservatives solely because of my position, adumbrated in the passage above, on postmodernism. They argue that “since it would be unspeakable for Slattery to come out against democracy, he has to say instead he is opposed to something he calls postmodernism”.

Not only is this infantile non-sequitur a travesty of logic, it's an abuse of common sense. Put it this way: if I am an enemy of democracy by virtue of my criticism of postmodernism, then the anti-democratic insurgency must have seduced the mainstream Anglo-American philosophical and scientific communities.

The distinguished Harvard biologist E. O Wilson speaks for his profession when he writes: “Scientists, being responsible for what they say, have not found postmodernism useful.”

Postmodernism has also inspired a chorus of criticism from left figures such as Noam Chomsky, Terry Eagleton and Eric Hobsbawm.

Chomsky's criticism is interesting because he blames the nutty anti-realist postures of postmodern academic writing, which treats objectivity as myth and logic as ideology, on the retreat of the left from mainstream debate. On the evidence of this book he has a case. Lucy and Mickler had a chance to launch a reasoned critique of conservative discourse, but they have instead produced a kind of pomo tabloid.

The feminist literary critic Lorna Sage, who was no enemy of postmodernism, nevertheless described it as an “authoritarian anti-authoritarianism”. Elaboration on this comes from French intellectual and one-time structuralist Tzvetan Todorov, who describes pomo as a form of dogmatic skepticism. “It is skepticism, to the extent that it considers knowledge and judgment impossible, along with truth and justice. But it is also dogmatism, because it decides in advance what each text means - namely, nothing.”

Oxford ethologist and science writer Richard Dawkins has observed how many honest academics of this time were “intimidated into silence” by the postmodern priesthood. Lucy and Mickler's diatribe bears out these forceful insights. It is nothing less than an attempt to silence dissent, and profoundly anti-democratic in its way.

Reviewing an anthology of academic perspectives critical of postmodernism titled Theory's Empire I argued, on January 27 last year, that some knowledge of basic philosophical concepts would help teachers and students contend critically with postmodernist notions that tend to be taught as received wisdom. “This is not to say that arguments for Derrida and his ilk should not be advanced, but that they should be advanced and tested philosophically rather than accepted on faith,” I concluded. “Where [postmodernist] theory is given shelter - increasingly, this includes schools and teaching colleges - its most intellectually respectable opponents should be invited too.”

Does this read like the ranting of someone aiming to "eradicate critical thought from society", and in fact "oppress" democracy, as these two edgy postmodernists claim? Quite clearly it's a call for a redoubling of critical activity. For open debate. For the very opposite of Lucy and Mickler's allegations.

The two had access to this passage: it was published 10 months before their paperback. Its absence is a telling rupture in their text, suggesting either a quite stupefying degree of unprofessionalism, or a calculated attempt to deceive their readers. Even polemicists need to get it right.

A few other features of Lucy and Mickler's caricature might help to flesh out this point. I'm supposed in their narrative to pine for the stitched-up 1950s, a time before I was born and an era for which I have not once declared a fondness. I am “at heart a book-burner” - a curious charge to lay against a literary journalist and former literary editor with a proven commitment to the exchange of ideas. In my eighteen months as editor of The Australian's Review of Books - a stewardship warmly praised by Inga Clendinnen in the Quarterly Essay - I published just the one article about postmodernism: a lengthy defence!

Curioser still, I read with interest in The War on Democracy that my intellectual mentor is the great bear Dr Johnson. The archives give the lie to this. In a recent article on literary biography I described James Boswell's greatest literary creation as a “monstrous wreck”, who in his early London years lived a “secret life” as a hack writer - “vulnerable, impassioned, unstable, and more than a little grotesque”. Where is the Johnsonian identification here?

There's nothing to justify Lucy and Mickler's amateurish conceit; and no evidence for it is provided. Readers who are on-side with pomo might take delight in seeing their opponents slayed, but they should still approach the book with caution for it feeds a rather base desire: it is blood sport.

But what a broken-backed exercise in pugilism it is. Niall Lucy, the author of several books popularising Derrida, remains a kind of parish priest in the much-diminished postmodern church. I am a left-liberal critic.

But this does not make me a black-hearted, book-burning neo-con striving to undermine democracy, nor Lucy a postmodernist angel and upholder of civil liberties. Criticism of postmodernism is not criticism of democracy.

In fact there is no innate connection between postmodernism and the virtues of liberty, equality and fraternity - the vacuous boast at the heart of The War on Democracy. Sections of the left have long observed its difficulty in affirming a positive oppositional political philosophy under the rubric of Derrida's "gesture of distrust". The controversy over Derrida's support for wartime anti-Semite Paul de Man also revealed the French pseudo sage's vulnerability on political questions, and inspired an effort on the part of his accolytes to extol the values of friendship and democracy. This shift of tone is all very well, at a theoretical and strategic level. Unfortunately, most of what we know about postmodernism's behaviour within the institutions that have so far given it shelter, suggests it is at once illiberal and coercive.

To what extent should writers such as Derrida have taken responsibility for the lunacies uttered in their name? The noted Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam has some penetrating things to say on this question: “… the fact remains that the thrust of Derrida’s work is so negative, so lacking in any sense of what we should construct, politically or otherwise, that it is difficult to exonerate him completely from responsibility for the effect of his teaching … the thrust of Derrida’s writing is that notions of ‘justification’, ‘good reason’ and ‘warrant’, and the like are primarily repressive gestures. And that view is dangerous because it provides aid and comfort for extremists …”

My critique of postmodernism is entirely consistent with mainstream opinion in Anglo-American philosophy, and for fairly uncontroversial - certainly apolitical - reasons. Most of what passes for postmodernism is bad philosophy, cliché and cant. At heart it is “anti-humanist” and “irrealist”: these labels are not applied in a polemical spirit; they are accepted elements of philosophical nomenclature.

I happen to agree with much of what Berkeley philosopher John Searle, one of the most influential figures in contemporary philosophy, says of Jacques Derrida: that he is fundamentally ignorant of many commonplaces in the philosophy of language, and that his own writings consist at worst of plain gibberish, at best of patently false (though spectacular sounding) claims based on logical errors. I am persuaded by Searle's defence of Enlightenment values - such as external realism - against Derrida's attacks on Western epistemology and what he calls “logocentrism”. As Derrida famously proclaimed: “There is nothing outside of text.”

This revival of medieval nominalism commits many postmodernists to various forms of epistemological - and even ethical - relativism. The relativist strains in postmodernism actually emasculate the practical force of truth; and truth has always been a key weapon in the fight against tyranny. Relativism is what John Howard invokes when wriggling away from the global commitment to greenhouse reduction.

The Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt, in his recently published essay On Truth, takes aim at postmodern relativism and fires. “As for the entitlements to deference and to respect that we ordinarily assign to fact and to truth, the postmodernists' view is that in the end the assignment of those entitlements is just up for grabs. It is simply a matter, they insist, of how you look at things ... according to the postmodernists' line of thought, the distinctions that we make between what is true and what is false are ultimately guided by nothing more indisputably objective, or more compellingly authoritative, than our own individual points of view.”

Perspectivism - the rather banal fact that we all see things differently - is in fact compatible with external realism.

Frankfurt is here writing for a general not a specialist audience; a more sophisticated and wide-ranging argument with postmodernist relativism can be sourced from Oxford ethicist Bernard Williams' Truth and Truthfulness. Williams describes postmodernists as the "deniers", and his book is a passionate defence of the value of truth against this turn in contemporary intellectual life. He argues that the democratic value of critique rests on a commitment to truth and the virtues that attend it: accuracy and sincerity.

Lucy and Mickler have delivered a master class in what happens when a school of thought jettisons the discursive goal of "getting at the truth".

I do not claim to be an “authority’ on postmodernism, though I have studied it with some enthusiasm - and a pretty high degree of competency - at graduate level. I was fortunate to have come into contact with this school of thought at a time - the early 1980s - and a place - Melbourne University - when it still seemed fresh and exciting.

I was able to study foundation structuralist and poststructuralist texts with a grounding in philosophy and classical social theory, and in a pluralistic environment: I was privileged to hear Howard Felperin lecture on Conrad and Barthes' S/Z, to attend lectures by Umberto Eco and Terry Eagleton. All this was before pomo ossified into an orthodoxy, and a bossy orthodoxy at that.

When a few years later I began to take issue with postmodernism in literary studies - I still believe it is essentially anti-literature - it was in a spirit of resistance to a dogma (a dogmatic scepticism): an attempt to foster debate, not suppress it.

Working under deadline pressure I may not have crafted every line of this response with impeccable care, and I've probably been guilty of intermittent shit-stirring. But one thing I never believed my writing on this subject would bring me is ... a promotion.