About a month ago, I had a conversation with mathematician and culture critic James Lindsay. We discussed the roots in postmodernism of critical race theory, why James was proud to vote for Donald Trump, whether the election was on the up-and-up, and what to make of the Jan 6 "insurrection" at the Capitol.
In the two segments below, we talk about postmodernism—Foucault, Derrida and company—and how it relates to the current-day racial discourse in the United States.
LOURY: Now, forgive my ignorance. I'm just a humble economist over here.
LINDSAY: Good for you.
What is postmodernism again? I know that's going to sound like a very silly question, but I have to ask.
No, it's a hard question. Because all the people who are postmodernists denied that they were postmodernists. And then you have people like Judith Butler, who is extremely postmodern, who said, if we defined postmodernism, it wouldn't really be postmodern anymore—so I can't be a postmodernist, and there can't be a definition of postmodernism.
But my working definition, given what's going on, is—I mean, we could pick a number of working definitions, but one of them is—the belief that a claim upon truth is actually an application of power. That, in fact, to make a claim on truth, you have to have been given the power to make that claim, whether it's by becoming a humble economist, whether it's by becoming a scientist and being credentialed with a Ph.D., whether it's by being appointed to a presidential council or the cabinet or whatever else. For example, Fauci has been appointed to the role that he's in to speak on behalf of COVID-19.
So their claim is that power decides who gets to claim what is and is not true.
And so, as Michel Foucault had it, his belief—and I think this is really quintessential of Foucauldian postmodernism—is that, if you have a claim upon the truth, a statement that you're saying might actually be true or false, but that misses the point. The point is that you have to interrogate the power dynamics that allowed somebody to have the authority to make that claim. And so it's a complete shift away from epistemology into turning everything into this squabbling about power dynamics.
There are other definitions that we could apply. The postmodern condition, for example, as laid out by Jean-Francois Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition—it was 1979 when he wrote that—he said, "I define the postmodern as an incredulity toward metanarratives," metanarratives being broad, sweeping explanations for how things work and how things are to be contextualized.
In a sense, what postmodernism could then be boiled down to is that every attempt to talk about how the world works is sort of on an even playing field, where none of them should be believed too seriously. They should all be seen as social and political constructions.
In other words, the social or cultural construction of knowledge and its relationship to power is the primary object of interest of postmodern philosophy.
Now, every claim seems inordinately strong, but some important claims resting on power dynamics seem like a hypothesis worth entertaining.
I agree.
In fact, I mentioned Fauchi quite intentionally. If we look at COVID-19 policy—you know, there's much skepticism around it, at least on the right. If you look at this situation, the way Fauchi said don't wear a mask, then he said wear a mask, then he said wear two masks, then he said the CDC maybe doesn't know if we should wear two masks, then he said no, probably two masks, maybe we have to do three masks…
When you see this kind of thing happening, people say, how did this happen? Why is the number changing?
Of course, science has to find answers and develop. I think it's reasonable to say that people are making their best guesses and, as they get better information, they'll update those guesses.
But there's also the possibility, when you get into anything fuzzier than Newtonian physics, which is quite cut and dry, when you get into anything fuzzier than the very hard sciences, that you do have this human element that has to be investigated and interrogated. I would say that that's probably something that you face a lot in economics as well. The order of complexity of the problem is extremely high. And so, human influences are a little higher than, say, in building a rocket to go to Jupiter, which is just straight, simple Newtonian mechanics, and you can get up there with a second's worth of accuracy.
They are a little bit nuanced around this. But if you read, for example, Lyotard, he's absolutely, savagely critical of science as being one of these metanarrative type things that needs to be doubted, that it's just another form of legitimation by paralogy, which means legitimation by consensus rather than legitimation by finding reliable evidence.
And then later in his life, he says that he actually didn't know what he was talking about with the science, he actually just butchered that by making a bunch of assumptions. He claimed near the end of his life that that was his most embarrassing work, it's his worst book. And it's taken as kind of a staple.
These guys were intellectual show-offs and they were looking primarily at soft sciences, where I grant them a hundred percent: It's not well-developed, it's not hard and fast, and there's a lot of the stuff they were talking about present there.
These guys being the French theorists.
The French postmodernists, yeah. I just think they were cynical in their approach, to be honest.
Good observations, bad prescriptions, very cynical.
I was just having this conversation this morning with somebody about money.
He was saying, money's not real. He's saying money is a fiction. And I was trying to explain: no, no, no, what money is is a convention. It's a convention that works because of the mutuality of people's expectations.
I take the dollar bill from you, which is worthless in and of itself, only because I anticipate someone else will take it from me in return for something that's of value.
They are willing to render something of value to me for that dollar bill in turn only because they anticipate that others will buy into the convention that the dollar bill can be exchanged for things of value.
Now, that is a very interesting intersubjectivity of human convention. It's not real in some objective sense. It's subjective. But it's extremely powerful.
The dollar bill is the least of these. I mean, what about debt? What about the complex financial instruments that we see being exchanged? What about Bitcoin?
All of these things are constructions of a kind, and there just seems to me to be a lot of traction in being able to enter into that kind of reflection.
So what I would tell you is that, whereas you have an extremely nuanced view, you have encountered the postmodern flattening of that view.
It’s one thing to say it's a convention, there are all these complicated, important things to understand. Yes, it is in some sense a socially constructed artifice.
And yet to say it's just a fiction—that's the postmodern flattening of something much more complex and nuanced.
And I think that you find this repeatedly, especially in Lyotard's confession about science later—that there's a lack of desire to fully understand the thing they criticize.
And while many of their descriptions about power, especially social power, are very spot on and very worth entertaining and worth mining for what they can teach us, especially in a world where social media is dominant—at the same time, cynical, simplistic, under-informed, and uninterested in any level of complexity or deep understanding is how I would characterize their work.
Foucault wrote these “genealogies,” he called them—he originally called them archaeologies—and the most contemporary copy of what he did is the 1619 Project.
They unearth various truths and contextualize them in a story that paints a more negative picture than reality. Whereas there are other ways to interpret that same data or to flesh it out with other data and create a more, I think, fair picture of what's actually going on.
It's very easy to be pessimistic and cynical that way. And I feel like that's a trap they fell into.
Well, I've been very critical of the 1619 Project here at the Glenn Show and elsewhere, so I wanted to note that.
However, I wanted to then go on and ask you, how could the dispute between different narratives—Nikole Hannah-Jones and the 1619 Project, we should think of the founding of the country as 1619, slavery is elemental, the principles of the founding fathers were not actually realized because of the structure of American society at that time, slavery not least amongst the offenses, and we've been struggling for 200 plus years to right the ship here, or to realize the ideals and we should understand that through the lens of African American freedom, struggle and so forth—that's one story; another story is America the exceptional nation, land of the free and so on.
What is the objective ground for discriminating between these narratives, other than the power of people that control the podium and the mediums of information dissemination, the news media, the prizes that are given?
Isn't it ultimately a struggle for power? I mean, is there any objective way of ascertaining whether there's a correct or incorrect narrative about the American founding?
So, what I would tell you is the 1619 Project is an attempt to rewrite the mythology of America.
And I would tell you that the mythology of America that we promoted in the 1950s was certainly a mythology of America, in a very real sense. It was definitely mythological, this exceptional nation.
There are reasons that we can say that America is special. A nation founded on ideas, for example, is one particular way. A nation that's based in, hopefully, neutral principles of constitutional law as adjudicated as best as possible by an imperfect judicial system.
And my opinion, just to render it flatly, is that when we look at these critical race theorists—because that's who these people are, Nikole Hannah-Jones has picked up a large amount of this line of thought, whether she is one or not technically—what you have is an attempt to write a new mythology to replace a mythology that was dominant in the 1950s.
And they act as though that mythology from the 1950s is still the thing to compete against, as though that is still the predominant belief of most Americans, which I think is an absurd claim. I think that we have actually made a lot of progress since the 1950s. But for their stuff to make sense, they have to pretend we have not, and that all that progress has been faked.
You mentioned Derrick Bell. That was essentially his thesis: the Civil Rights Act actually just made things worse, Brown vs. Board of Education just made things worse for African Americans. It's a very pessimistic and almost paranoid approach to what was happening.
Again, not to replace it with some rosy garbage—like, no, we passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, Voting Rights Act in '65 another civil rights act in '68, and then everything was perfect. Nobody believes that, I don't think.
But there's this comparison between these two national mythologies that very few people—if you were to get down to brass tacks and do a poll, especially four or five years ago before all this stuff blew up—very few people would believe either one of those mythologies in whole.
And so this is where we look at that “incredulity toward metanarratives.” These mythologies are metanarratives about the United States. So we have to be a little bit incredulous about these.
Now, is there an objective podium?
Thats’s my question.
I don't think so, to be honest, not fully.
But there are matters of fact.
We can read Thomas Jefferson, in his own words that he wrote himself, struggling with the issue. We can read Abraham Lincoln in his own words, struggling with the issue. We can read Frederick Douglas, in his own words, attacking the issue and appealing to that set of ideas that the United States was founded on.
When people say we should tell the history of the United States, warts and all, I agree with that. I think that we should not mythologize ourselves into some glorious, perfect thing that never was and still isn't. But at the same time, we don't have to adopt this narrative, which is very useful to activists, this other mythology that paints the picture much more darkly than it is.
Painting the picture too bright is an error, but painting the picture too dark is also an error. And seeking to do responsible, ethical historical work, for example, to understand that the people who are involved at each stage and to make the best out of what they were saying, I think is a way to, as we say, correct the record as much as possible.
The epistemic fog of history is real, but we should strive to have the most clear and accurate understanding. And we should try to unearth more documents and more context and understand and accept what's real and what isn't real rather than trying to force a story onto something and then make that story seem real by contorting the data. And again, I could tell you how Foucault did this with madness and homosexuality.
What I see in the 1619 Project is a willful attempt to deny progress. It's a story that says “This was bad. Then this happened and it was still bad. Then this happened and it was still bad. Then this happened and it was even worse.” That's not really a great way to tell the story. That's not reflective at all of reality.
I'm going to try to defend Derrick Bell here. It's going to require a little bit of effort. But I knew Derrick Bell. I actually reviewed Faces at the Bottom of the Well when it was first published. And I was a critic—I was vaguely conservative back in the '80s and early '90s, I was a critic.
But I came to have a good deal more sympathy for why he didn't see the successes of Brown and the Civil Rights Act of '64 and the Voting Rights Act and the general agenda of civil rights progressivism as an adequate resolution of the problem with the subordination of slaves and their descendants. I came to have a greater appreciation for that. So I'm going to try to offer a defense to see how you react to it.
You may find me pretty receptive to this.
Okay.
I'm saying: in 1980, there are 500,000 people under lock and key on a given day, maybe 40% of them are Black. In the year 2000—I think Derrick Bell died before 2000, I'm not sure about that, but anyway, let me tell my story—over the course of the next two decades, the incarceration rate in the United States rises to where there are 2 million people under lock and key on a given day, and nearly half of them are Black.
A lot of that has to do with the War on Drugs. It doesn't have only to do with the War on Drugs, but a lot of it has to do with the War on Drugs.
Now, if the people subject to all of this imprisonment, this three strikes and you're out, these longer sentences, this draconian imposition of state power, had been white, the deliberative processes of American social reflection would have been vastly mobilized on behalf of the project of reform. But because they were Black, goes to this story, it was not.
They were expendable. They were people, in our collective political imagination, who are less than fully human. We didn't see their humanity. It was possible not to see it because they were Black, and it was possible to impose this draconian regime.
But let's examine this regime for a minute.
This regime was a political outcome. This is not etched in stone, this is not nature, there's nothing in the natural order of things here. These are judgments that institutions have made and are enforcing.
And by the way, they're incredibly violent. The scale of the mobilization of power and the infliction of power of state coercion on these populations is incredible. It's not slavery, but if I am reminded of slavery by what is going on, please forgive me.
And moreover, what's the root of it? The root of it, at least in the drug area, is that huge numbers of Americans are hedonistic, consumer-oriented, wealthy, spoiled, many of them—maybe most of them—white people who want to get high. That creates a hundred billion dollar-a-year commerce in illicit traffic.
At the same time, we want not to embrace our hedonism fully and in a hypocritical fashion, we let it ... Okay, I could go on in this vein, you see where I'm going with this. We are balancing our cultural budget on the backs of the weakest people.
This is latter-day racism. To not see it as latter-day racism is to buy into a fairy tale about the nature of this country. The real nature of American democracy is being exposed by this.
And if I don’t de-mystify this structure—in other words, this is not just that they break the law, and they're being locked up for breaking the law—if I don't see where law comes from, if I don't understand why law doesn't change in response to negative consequences of its application, if I don't see this as being rooted in racial history, I am living in a fantasy world.
The real world is a world of racial domination. It's going under a different cover in the year 1990 than it would have been in the year 1890, but it's pretty much a very intrinsically American story.
And by the way, critical theory—Foucault, Derrida and company—helped me understand and express this criticism that I'm making right now much more effectively than before it came along.
What's wrong with that?
Not much, to be honest, in the big picture sense.
But let me tell the same story from Foucault's perspective, and maybe you'll get what I'm laying down here. So Foucault looks at the history of sexuality. This is probably his most famous work, The History of Sexuality. It's in four volumes. It's voluminous. The first volume is the most relevant.
Excuse me for interrupting. You're a mathematician, as I understand it. You've read these volumes?
Unfortunately, I have read them.
Okay, just checking.
I've read Foucault. Foucault is not that bad.
I will confess to have only kind of read Derrida because nobody can read Derrida, it's impossible. And that's, I think, literally true because he did wordplay in French that doesn't translate, and the translations are all bad. Derrida went to the day he died complaining nobody understood a damn thing he was saying. And if you try to read Derrida, you'll understand why it's impossible.
So I have read Foucault. I've tried to read Derrida, that's all anybody can say. I've read all these guys.
I'm impressed.
Yeah, well, Foucault is not terrible to read, actually. He's a bit grandiose.
I've read Discipline and Punish, but that's the only one. Excuse me again.
We can do Discipline and Punish too. I'm just not as familiar with it. I can rattle off The History of Sexuality a little bit more tightly.
Please proceed. I apologize for interrupting you.
No, no, no, it's good because incredulity toward having read postmodernists is a common thing, because they're very difficult to read and they're not pleasant to read.
Anyway, The History of Sexuality. He starts off saying way back in the Christian domination days, homosexuality was regarded—this is again a social construction— as a mortal sin. It's just an absolutely heinous thing, it's an abomination against God, yada, yada. And so you had to put gay people to death. You had to throw them in holes with a great over the top of them, you know, in the dungeon, et cetera. You have to absolutely persecute gays on religious grounds.
Then along comes, in the nineteenth century, sexology. People start studying homosexuality, and they come to the conclusion pretty rapidly that it's a mental disorder.
And so now we're no longer considering homosexuals raging sinners, although the Christians may still. The more refined and intellectual people, the intelligentsia, are seeing them now as psychologically disordered.
So what do you have to do with them? Well, you have to put them in asylums. You have to electroshock them. You have to lobotomize them. You have to do all these horrible things in the clinic—he talked about the history of the clinic.
So what he says is, we had bad times and then we went to more bad times. And then later we see again, it's still criminalized. It switches to okay, maybe it's not a mental disorder, but it's criminal—this is leading up to the 1950s—and then, leading into the 1970s and ‘80s, it's no longer criminal, that battle has been won, and now it's just absolutely a social taboo. Gays are forced to meet in secret bath houses, where Foucault ends up contracting AIDS. He believed to the day he died that AIDS was a social construct, primarily to control the gay population, even as he was dying of it.
His argument is, there's no improvement from step one to step two, to step three, to step four. There's no improvement whatsoever from “This problem with homosexuality is on the metaphysical plane, it's a sin, an abomination against God” to “Wait, maybe it's something inside somebody's head.”
I see that as an improvement, even though the conditions didn't improve much materially.
And then from there to “Wait, maybe it's not actually a psychological disorder, but it's still bad.” And now you've removed the disorder aspect from this. And then you go a step further, and now it's just socially taboo.
He doesn't see this as progress, where we're at no point in that progress is everything perfect. He sees it as just the same manifestation of the same problem all along.
But for me, if you have moved from saying that there is a literally otherworldly reason that you can't possibly touch, that's utterly unfalsifiable, from why gay people are intrinsically bad to, wait, maybe it's inside their head, maybe it's something in the world, you've made tremendous progress. And he doesn't acknowledge that progress. And I think that Derrick Bell's doing something similar.
Now I have a probably controversial opinion. I think that Derrick Bell—and I think, in fact, Robin DiAngelo—are, at the most recent end of the same spectrum, pointing to very real things that they misdiagnose. Plus, this relentless pessimism.
I don't think that Derrick Bell's wrong for pointing at what he's pointing at. I think he's wrong for pointing at the causes or misdiagnosing the causes.
First of all, it's similar to but not identical to slavery. And that distinction must be acknowledged. And I think that this pessimism tends to miss that.
Certainly, it's different than slavery. People were literally being bought and sold and not considered to be human. It's a very different thing from, well, you're a human who broke the law and you have to go to jail, and it’s going to be hard labor and we will probably profit off of you. This is a very different thing. It's not good. I didn't say it's good. But it's different.
And so if you completely negate that difference, you're doing something a little bit pessimistic and a little bit cynical.
Further, my thinking on Derrick Bell is that what he was actually looking at—and you may disagree or agree with me, I don't know—is that what we saw in 1964 not only the passage of the Civil Rights Act, but we saw that President Johnson began the Great Society.
The Great Society was, in many programs, probably quite good. But in other programs it established entitlements that had horrific effects on poor communities that skew disproportionately Black and brown. And those entitlement programs began to skew things in a particular way that created those conditions.
Now, why is it relevant to bring that up? Because this was a failure of progressive policy. I say this as somebody who's identified as a progressive for my entire life. This was a failure of progressive policy that had bad unintended consequences.
But then to say, “Oh, this is just a revamping of racism.” What it was was a sloppy hand trying to fix a problem in a ham-fisted way that created new problems that have very similar expressions.
Now, by 1990, 1992, when he wrote Faces at the Bottom of the Well, what's really going on here? Was racism gone? Glenn, I tell you, I live in the South. No, it wasn't. 1992, it was still pretty racist, okay?
I believe you.
I live in the South. I have seen the change. I have lived through the change. And I assume that from 1990 or so back to 1970 there were also changes, but I wasn't there for those. I was born in ‘79. I don't really remember before the late eighties very well. So we'll leave it at that.
But I've seen the change since 1990 to now, these past 30 years. There's been a lot of change.
And so what's going on in the 1990s? Certainly there's still racism. Certainly. I mean, we had Joe Biden standing up and dropping this particular crime bill that we're actually kind of pointing at. We see the impacts of the attempt to put in affirmative action and where that worked and where it didn't. We see people deciding maybe we need to back off from that, and then we have certain activists, Derrick Bell among them, who were thinking, “No, pedal to the metal. We need more of this.”
And so you have a whole lot of stuff going on. But at the same time—and I'm not doing the “Let's play the exception card”—but you have to recognize he's writing Face at the Bottom of the Well in 1992. It says black people are at the very bottom of the well.
Oprah Winfrey has the biggest television show on TV. Michael Jordan is the most famous person in the world. Michael Jackson's the King of Pop, king of everything, he's not totally weird yet.
Bill Cosby.
Bill Cosby—you have to watch the third rail, but yeah, the number one television show, right?
Things were not the same. And I'm not saying like, look at the exceptions and forget. I'm saying things were not 1970 anymore.
In the 1990s, I loved to watch Black comedians. I still think Black comedians did more to end racism than anybody. Because they helped people, white people in particular, learn to laugh at themselves.
The thing that critical race theorists say, “White people need to learn that they have a culture.” Like, Richard Pryor told us that, are you kidding? We were laughing about that 30 years ago, guys. You don't have to shame us for something we already dealt with (except maybe the progressives who haven't realized this).
So what I'm seeing with Derrick Bell, and I'm seeing with Robin DiAngelo—Derrick Bell's different of course, because he's Black and Robin Dangelo is white, but I think Robin DiAngelo’s whole book is a confession to this—is that the progressives have had a pretty bad track record with confronting their own racism, and they're projecting it onto everybody, unfairly.
And I think therefore many of the things they say are true, but they don't apply to everybody, they don't apply to society at large. They apply to the bubble and the circle that they run in.
What is the racism of the progressives? Can you spell that out?
Well, there's this wonderful book—if you haven't ever read it, it's a true gem—called Good White People.
I have not.
It was written in, I think, 2014 or ‘15. It’s by Shannon Sullivan, she's not small. But Robin DiAngelo is great for this too. Or we could go back to Malcolm X. Even Martin Luther King in his most frustrated moments in “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”—they’re all talking about “the white liberal.” The white liberal this, the white liberal that.
Good White People is about white progressives and white liberals, which Robin DiAngelo defines as someone who thinks they get it, somebody who thinks they're less racist, somebody who thinks that they're not racist. DiAngelo says, and I quote, "Good white liberals do the most daily damage to people of color." Okay?
So these are the people who are writing policy like the Great Society, or like Joe Biden's new equity program. They think they're helping. They aren't bothering to actually connect with people, whether it's Black people, whether it's Trump voters, whether it's whoever. They're up in their Ivory Tower—or I guess it's maybe pearly white tower or whatever it is—and they're refusing to actually meet people where they are, they're refusing to actually try to find what's really going on.
But they are—we say “virtue signaling”—they're signaling: “I have the right views on this issue. I know what's best. I know how to do it.” They think, because they are on the so-called right side of history, that they are—I think DiAngelo is right—not racist. And they don't have to argue with themselves. They don't have to dig into themselves and see what's really going on here.
I read these critical whiteness studies people, and what I think is they're the kind of person who walks down the street, and a Black person walks by the other way. And they see that Black person and say in their head—not out loud, that'd be really weird—they say in their head, “There's a Black person.” And then they think, “Oh my God, I noticed! Oh my God! I noticed! Argh!” And they continue. “I can't believe I saw race. I can't believe we saw race.”
The next thing you know, they hurry back to their apartment and type out an angry blog post about how seeing race is racist, to project that out into the world that all white people do this.
I think it’s almost a form of mental illness at that point, to be honest with you. And I don't think that it's coming from a place of honesty or reckoning.
I talk to my conservative friends, which I have many of now. They say, “Yeah, we've been called racists for 50 years. So we've all had to ask ourselves: are we? What do we do when we encounter racial difference? Are we?” And most of them have reckoned through this and have gotten over it.
And they watched, again, the Black comedians who so purposefully made good fun, and I mean that in the ha-ha sense, good fun of white culture and made it visible, did all the stuff that these shame merchants are trying to do now. But they did it in a way that worked. And they did it in a way that brought people together, able to laugh, share a room, et cetera, rather than having to do whatever there is now, where we have to go into separate struggle sessions.
Dr. Loury typically goes to some length to tease apart the many underlying causes of complex social problems, but here seems to claim the high incarceration rate of the black male population can be simply explained by white hedonism and the implicit racism of Congress. This reductive approach generally is not characteristic of Dr. Loury's work. Have I misunderstood the argument?
Glenn made some strong points in his defense of Derrick Bell. Race almost certainly was part of the calculus on the War on Drugs. But what about gender? The people imprisoned by the War on Drugs are disproportionately Black, but even more so they are disproportionately male.
There was a confluence of factors starting in the 1960s in the U.S.: The rise of the welfare state; the rise of women in the workforce; the offshoring of manufacturing. All of these factors served to marginalize poor and working class men. What to do with them? Send them off to be killed in battle? No, that was no longer politically acceptable. How about we find reasons to lock them in cages? And that's what we've done.
Imagine the outcry if women of whatever color were imprisoned at similar rates.