Postmodernism for Rationalists Powerpoint

slatestarscratchpad:

bambamramfan:

Postmodernism is… 

• A badly misinterpreted term with a lot of baggage 

• Can’t be tabooed because none of its elements are sufficiently synonymous with the gestalt 

• Kind of like a conglomerate corporation 

• Is Amazon a… Bookstore? Cloud computing provider? Organic grocery chain? Liberalleaning newspaper? Movie rating website? Game streaming service? 

• Reducible, but unsatisfactorily
    • Amazon is a Seattle-based public corporation helmed by Jeff Bezos, trading under the ticker AMZN 

• The definition fits, but doesn’t really tell you anything 

• “But that’s still informative to someone who has no idea what Amazon is” – True, so…
    • Postmodernism is a post-WWII collection of reactionary movements in art, architecture, literature, and philosophy to the totality of prior approaches in each discipline. 

Trying to understand this, parts of it I can at least make sense of, but can anyone explain the claim that capitalism is central to the modern idea of identities/“tribes”?

When I think of these groups, I think Catholics, New Atheists, SJWs, channers, kinksters, gun nuts, transhumanists, fanfic writers, etc.

None of these are capitalism focused in the sense where they’re things like “Pepsi drinkers” or “North Face wearers”. A few have marketable accessories - gun nuts need their guns, kinksters need their handcuffs - but that doesn’t seem any more central than Catholics buying the occasional crucifix necklace. I agree capitalists market to these groups - you can always buy your Darwin fish bumper sticker or your THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE t-shirt or whatever - but it doesn’t seem interesting in the grand scheme of things.

And what the heck does it mean to say “no universal values except money” or “money is the common denominator”? Money seems uniquely and surprisingly unimportant in social discourse - no New Atheist is going to say “The Pope seems like a bad guy, but I’ve got to give him credit for having a palace made of gold”. Mark Zuckerberg has more money than God and everybody hates him for unclear reasons. A Ta-Nehisi Coates or Bill O'Reilly has a hundred times more cultural influence than the average multimillionaire.

So, to be clear up front, I haven’t read that Powerpoint and don’t really wanna right now.  I am jumping into this conversation in ignorance.  That said:

can anyone explain the claim that capitalism is central to the modern idea of identities/“tribes”? 

Sure.

In brief: pre-industrialized-capitalism, you didn’t have “the modern idea of identities/’tribes.’”  You had actual tribes, which worked pretty differently. 

When you’re a peasant living in a village, your community is the village.  This is totally obvious, because it’s the people in the village who form your entire social world, and it’s the people in the village whose personal politics determine the shape and quality of your life.  Maybe this identification can get swept up into some broader identity-versus-identity discourse – “OK, everyone in this village is Catholic, so, sure, we’ll hate the Huguenots over in that other village and we’re totally happy to go murder them” – but mostly it’s pretty organic and pretty inescapable. 

Capitalism pulls people away from this metic tribal system, and shoves them into a much-more-individualistic world defined by contract, where the only people who care about you are (a) your employer, whose relationship with you is expressly founded on a bare foundation of mutual gain, and (b) anyone that you can personally convince to care about you.  Thus you get people forming groups like New Atheists or SJWs or whatever, based on things they believe themselves to have in common. 

And what the heck does it mean to say “no universal values except money” or “money is the common denominator”? Money seems uniquely and surprisingly unimportant in social discourse…

The response here, I think, boils down to “discourse is downstream of power, and money is power in a capitalist society.” 

There are, in fact, plenty of people who will explicitly argue for the position that money is equivalent to worth or competence (and thus, e.g., that we should be giving CEOs more in the way of political power etc.).  But that’s a sideshow.  The real relevant point is that, without anyone arguing anything, most people will end up sacrificing lots of their lives and their ideals for the sake of money – and that having access to lots of money is generally a prerequisite to being influential in most respects – and that “normal” people with “normal” values tend to end up viewing goodness-in-the-world through a financial lens.  Which makes sense, because in a capitalist society, you can do pretty much anything with money, and therefore “caring about doing things” generally equates to “caring about getting your hands on money.”  It’s not like rationalists are particularly wealth-obsessed, for example, but they’re the ones claiming that the dollar is The Unit of Caring…