Socialism & Postmodernism For Dummies - Stephen Hicks - #171

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, my friends. Welcome back. My guest today is Stephen Hicks, and we are talking about Postmodernism and Socialism. Their words have been thrown around an awful lot if you've been involved in the internet for the last few years, but I haven't got a clue what the underpinnings of them are. I don't know what Socialism is as a philosophical perspective. I don't know why Postmodernism believes the things that it believes or really even what it believes. So I wanted to get someone on who does actually understand what they're talking about so that we can all appreciate the words that we're using. I think a lot of the time you just hear something on the internet and then assume a definition of it and then just start moving forward with your life. I imagine if you found out that tree wasn't the name for a tree and it was actually something else, you'd be like, Oh God, I've been calling it a tree all my life. But anyway, yeah, so I spoke to Stephen. I wanted him to explain it to us. So this is Socialism and Postmodernism for Dummies. Really great primer, especially as we're about to enter the US election cycle. The UK was so at odds with each other during the general election. And hopefully the next time that someone decides to bring up politics and uses Socialism or Postmodernism in a sentence, you will know what they mean. But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful, Stephen Hicks.
So, Postmodernism and Socialism, right? They're words that are thrown around a lot. And yet, I can't define them myself. I don't, if you ask me to tell you what do these words mean, I couldn't give you a definitive answer. And I don't think many other people could either. So, can you?

**Stephen Hicks** (2:01)
Well, fair enough, yes. All of those are high level abstractions, and we're a smart species. We take huge amounts of information in about the complicated world. And so, it is a process to go through to define any high level of abstraction. Now, those two are not unique. If you try to define liberalism or conservatism, or Christianity or religion or Islam, again, there are going to be lots of variations and lots of things that are being included in those concepts. So, you should expect that it has to be some work before a definition arises. Now, to take postmodernism first, the labeling is well chosen. I didn't originate the term, but if you break it down, postmodern. So, that means we understand what post is, it comes after, or it's a replacement of, and then modernism. So, what do we take modernism to be? Then we start to break that one down. Well, different areas of inquiry, literature, history, philosophy, they often use labels like that differently. So, I'm a philosopher by training, and I do history of philosophy. So, I am using it the way philosophers and historians will use modernism. And basically, that means the last 500 years or so of history, especially in the western world. And that makes sense because if you look at what was going on in the world 500 years ago, well, it's within a generation of columbus crossing the ocean. And that's a game changer, right, on all sorts of dimensions. It is the generation of the high Renaissance. So we have Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian and other revolutionary artists who are functioning. So the art world is changing dramatically. It's going to be the century in which vesalius is publishing his anatomical work. So we have a first study of how the human body actually works. It's copernicus coming up with the idea of the sun being at the center of the system instead of the earth. So modern physics and astronomy are being revolutionized. It's the century of actually in the 15 teens, Martin Luther and the beginnings of the reformation and the counter reformation. So it makes sense that historians and philosophers were saying, you know, there's a huge amount going on in all of these sectors. The world is being upended and so forth. So we're into the modern world. We are global. We're doing religion differently. We're doing science differently. We are going to starting to think about politics and economics differently. And an art is changing. So that's what we mean by the modern world. Now, what the postmoderns are going to be arguing and is that we understand there has been a revolution in all of these areas over the course of the last several centuries. We think all of that has come to an end and we need to go beyond that. And then more normatively, most of them will say we think the modern world has been a mistake or that all of those revolutions that have occurred have led to negative, disastrous, pathological results. And so we need to transform society in another direction.