Controversial opinion, but I think any substantive critique of postmodernism has to acknowledge the fact that the postmodernists have a point. That supposedly neutral institutions or concepts do contain biases that favor certain interests. My objection to postmodernism is that instead of arguing for a better rationality, a more self-aware rationality, it jettisons rationality, and leaves us with no cogent foundation for morality, justice, etc.
... right wing criticism of postmodernism has gotten popular since the 1980s when the right discovered Antonio Gramsci.<p>It's never been coherent because postmodernism is basically a characteristic of the culture and not an intellectual movement. (Although various intellectual movements claim the term) In short, modernist ideologies, particularly Marxism, became untenable post-1970 or so. The right wing has been a beneficiary because now it's hard to convince people that you can get ahead rationally planning anything and you might as well just be <i>Lassez-Faire</i>. This is just one of the of the cautionary tales<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hanoi_Rat_Massacre" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hanoi_Rat_Massacre</a><p>but you can see it in two great anti-architecture books that advocate for (alternatively) traditional downtowns and strip-mall construction<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_and_Life_of_Great_American_Cities" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_and_Life_of_Great_Am...</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_from_Las_Vegas" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_from_Las_Vegas</a><p>Robert Jay Lifton described two examples of postmodern personality types in this book:<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Protean-Self-Human-Resilience-Fragmentation/dp/0465064213" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Protean-Self-Human-Resilience-Fragmen...</a><p>one of those was environmental activists, the other was fundamentalist Christians, which represent a particularly stark example of turning their back on rationality. Fundamentalists believe they've got the right to pick some book and decide it is absolutely true; their original sin is that they stole a book from Jewish people and added a few mor chapters. Nothing stops Muslims or Mormons from adding more books, or for anyone who wants to drop out of rational discourse with other people from inserting any axioms or postulates they want into their own closed system.<p>It's true that the "woke" are just as interested in creating their own reality like Shirley McClaine as the postmodern right (witness the poor man's dialecticalism of <i>How to be an anti-racist</i>) but postmodernism is the ocean we swim in woke or not. It's depressing because when I asked a philosopher what comes after postmodernism the answer was "post-humanism".
It seems the problem the author has is twofold:<p>1. Having failed to recognize that mutual aid is an objective truth of evolutionary successful behavior in social animals and is absolutely rational behavior and that so-called self-interested behavior (at the expense of other people) is in fact not really self-interested because we live in groups, and is irrational behavior in social animals...<p>2. ... that therefore 'social justice' is relativistic and arbitrary, when in social animals, it most certainly is anything but.