It’s safe to say that Trump has never plowed through the works of Derrida, Baudrillard, or Lyotard (if he’s even heard of them), and postmodernists are hardly to blame for all the free-floating nihilism abroad in the land. But some dumbed-down corollaries of their thinking have seeped into popular culture and been hijacked by the president’s defenders, who want to use its relativistic arguments to excuse his lies, and by right-wingers who want to question evolution or deny the reality of climate change or promote alternative facts. [...]
This viewpoint that “all truths are partial (and a function of one’s perspective),” says Kakutani, is how creationists conclude that schools should “teach both”: their view, intelligent design, alongside the one supported by the scientific method, evolution. And how Donald Trump was able to say there were “some very fine people on both sides” at the alt-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia last year.
“[Deconstruction] promulgated an extreme relativism that was ultimately nihilistic in its implications: anything could mean anything; an author’s intent did not matter, could not in fact be discerned; there was no such thing as an obvious or common-sense reading, because everything had an infinitude of meanings,” writes Kakutani. “In short there was no such thing as truth.”
No comments:
Post a Comment