“Do not go gentle into that good night!

Rage, rage against the dying of the light!”

— Dylan Thomas

Detractors of postmodernism seem to have taken Dylan Thomas’ injunction to heart. The light here is the soothing night light of objective truth and morality, familiar glows that have guided us through most of our history. This light, these doomsayers say, has been extinguished by postmodernism, plunging us into a hopeless night, an age of obscurantism, indecency and despair.

At first glance, postmodernism might seem pretty harmless. Indeed, it is an umbrella term, referring to an array of philosophical systems and concepts that often have little to do with each other. It is sometimes used interchangeably with the term “French Theory,” as some of its most notable thinkers were French philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard. But what makes postmodernism such a bogeyman is its skeptical energy.

Postmodernism definitely did not invent skepticism. Already in the 18th century, David Hume threw doubt not only on the scientific method, but also on the existence of our very selves. Before him, Descartes posed a seemingly unsolvable puzzle by suggesting the impossibility of proving we were not dreaming, thus jeopardizing all we thought we knew about the world. And even earlier than that, in Ancient Greece, skeptics such as Xenophanes were already questioning our ability to attain knowledge about the world. Thus, one might wonder why it took us so long to start worrying about skepticism. The answer may lie in the fact that, while premodern skepticism represented an issue contained to philosophical circles, postmodernism permeated the zeitgeist, i.e., the cultural landscape.

Developing in the 1960s and ’70s, postmodernism accompanied the socio-political turmoil that characterized the Western world at the time. It was the age of counterculture, as seen in May ’68 in France, the Prague Spring and the protests against the Vietnam War in the U.S., to name a few. Key to this counterculture was a rejection of the grand narratives of the time, namely the dominant ideologies of capitalism, but also Marxism — what Lyotard called “metanarratives”, big stories that articulate history in a way that creates meaning and legitimizes a certain kind of society.

This rejection was formalized and crystallized in the works of postmodern thinkers. Indeed, as students and workers were taking to the streets, denouncing the evils of capitalism and patriarchy, postmodern philosophers were deconstructing the ideological foundations of such systems. Academic papers and articles echoed the mistrust and frustration written on the signs brandished by protesters. This pervasiveness of postmodernism, stemming from its capturing of the societal “vibe,” prompted thinkers like Frederic Jameson to call it the “cultural logic of late capitalism”, which is our present historical stage.

As such, postmodern thinkers did not create society’s mistrust of tradition and grand narratives. They merely reflected on it, formalized it and allowed us to think through it. In a world torn between the capitalist Scylla and the Stalinist Charybdis, between the gulag and the factory, red imperialism and blue imperialism, postmodern thinkers stuck to the narrow channel of intellectual honesty, rejecting both as infringements upon human freedom.

Some philosophers, notably, contemporary Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, have criticized this position as sterile and impotent, offering no motor for social change and emancipation. However, such a critique does not give postmodernism its due. Thanks to it, both liberalism’s and Leninism’s claims to human emancipation have been dispelled, allowing us to begin to think through what emancipation might look like.

Postmodern skepticism is the ideological Great Leveler: Truth (capital T) being unattainable, all claims laid to it are dismissible, and all facts now require a leap of faith — faith that we are not dreaming, faith that induction holds up.

Postmodernism itself is already falling apart, breaking under the pressure of its own inconsistencies — being the mishmash of philosophies that it is — but its skeptic discoveries remain. The postmodern abolition of certainty might seem terrifying, a Pandora’s box of fake news, deep fakes and other monstrosities. But what it actually does is compel us to work with more attainable conceptions of truth(s). It shifts the discussion from the correspondence, or not, of our beliefs to an inaccessible objective. Truth to a focus on values, on what we want out of the ideas and ideologies to which we subscribe, or not.

Paraphrasing Hume, Olly from PhilosophyTube tells us: “Skepticism is a bit like coleslaw; a little bit is okay, but would you want to eat a meal that’s just coleslaw?” With postmodernism, the coleslaw is served. Now, it is up to us to cook the main dish.