By Lewis Loflin
Reason, science, and liberty—intertwined pillars of Western culture—drove remarkable progress since the Enlightenment. Today, postmodernism challenges these foundations, questioning rational inquiry, scientific method, and cultural unity. Launched by Jean-Francois Lyotard’s 1979 The Postmodern Condition, it spread widely after communism’s collapse, influencing academia, politics, and public discourse.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes postmodernism as “a set of critical, strategic, and rhetorical practices” to “destabilize concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning.” Britannica notes its “broad skepticism, subjectivism, or relativism” and “suspicion of reason”—core to science and Western thought.
Lyotard rejected “grand narratives”—like scientific advancement or rational progress—for fragmented, subjective perspectives, arguing knowledge is contingent, not universal. This built on Martin Heidegger’s critique in Being and Time (1927), where the Nazi-aligned philosopher questioned reason’s dominance, influencing postmodern relativism. The Left seized this to address Stalin’s 1913 challenge: dismantling the nation-state, a “stable community… formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological makeup manifested in a common culture,” held together by 18th-century rationalism.
Postmodernism, through tools like political correctness and multiculturalism, seeks to erode this cohesion, prioritizing doubt over clarity. See Deconstructing the West: Multiculturalism’s Hidden Origins.
James Bennett, in New Criterion (February 2011), observed this in Britain, a trend mirrored in the U.S.:
Postmodernists embraced mass immigration without assimilation… to break down adherence to a common culture… A population without a common language [or] assumptions… is easier to manipulate… They cultivated groups with grievances against the mainstream—racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities—bound as allies against the majority culture.
This aligns with my critiques in Oikophobia and Regressive Liberalism. By resisting assimilation and amplifying identity conflicts, postmodernism echoes Stalin’s nation-breaking, often via Heidegger-inspired multiculturalism.
Science, rooted in reason, faces mounting threats. Alex Berezow (2016) asked:
How should scientists respond to the rising tide of anti-scientific sentiment?… Protests against genetic engineering, vaccines, chemicals, modern agriculture, neuroscience, nuclear power… threaten decades of progress.
Dr. Marcel Kuntz of CNRS warns:
Postmodernism considers scientists untrustworthy, subjecting research to ‘participative democracy’… Science is not democratic—it’s a method, elitist yet open to those who apply it… free from political correctness.
The Left often peddles “the science”—think climate change or public health—yet reinterprets it through social justice or seeks validation by vote, not evidence. In 2024, MIT protests disrupted genetic research talks, citing “colonial biases,” while climate debates lean on “consensus” over method—postmodernism sidelining science’s rigor for ideology.
Postmodernism’s reach extends to technology, which the Left views with hostility—seeing it as a tool of oppression or a prop for capitalism, not a rational advance. This reflects Lyotard’s rejection of progress: AI, biotech, and industrial tech face scrutiny as exploitative. Take “green” energy: advocates push solar panels and windmills, yet dismiss the pollution, mining damage, and rare material costs—e.g., cobalt from Congo’s hazardous mines—required to produce them. It’s not about climate, but framing Western technology as the villain. In 2025, campus campaigns against “tech colonialism” target Silicon Valley, ignoring tech’s benefits, a stance tied to Left-Islamism’s anti-Western bent.
This anti-reason ethos fuels political correctness, stifling inquiry—e.g., shielding Islamist critiques—or environmentalism, where tech is evil, not a solution. Claims like “white paper reflects racial dominance” show postmodernism finding “oppression” where reason sees utility. Genetics, IQ studies, and climate models face suppression not for data but for clashing with this dogma, mirroring Regressive Liberalism’s identity statism.
Postmodernism, from Lyotard and Heidegger, undermines the West’s rational core—science as method, technology as progress, culture as unity. By favoring relativism, “democratic” science, and tech hostility—evident in green energy’s contradictions—it advances Stalin’s nation-breaking, amplified by political correctness and multiculturalism. Its impact—on inquiry, innovation, cohesion—raises a question tied to Oikophobia: can a society thrive when its foundations are questioned? This invites reflection on reason’s future.
Further reading:
Marxist utopianism. The failure of Marxism was that its short-range predictions of building a better world were shown, by comparison with capitalist, non-Marxist, and democratic societies, to be at a disadvantage; and indeed the workers and ordinary people in non-Marxist lands achieved a better standard of living, enjoyed a more creative level, with greater cultural enrichment, than those in the banal kind of Marxist societies developed by bureaucracies. After a century of Marxism--and Marx was no doubt the greatest humanist thinker of the nineteenth century--and after the patent failure of Marxism, the question can now be raised, Where does atheism now stand? Why has the atheist/freethought/rationalist movement failed? Why is it so weak in so many countries of the world?
Ref. In Defense of Eupraxophy by Paul Kurtz, Humanism Today, 1991
Acknowledgment: I’d like to thank Grok, an AI by xAI, for helping me draft and refine this article. The final edits and perspective are my own.
