In a previous post, Generational tipping point: 2021, I hypothesized a certain kind of Strauss-Howe generational event. I define "abandon business" events as the yielding of dominance and power by a dominant generation to its successor. This, of course, would affect the entire society.
First, it's fallacious to look for evidence to confirm any hypothesis—per Karl Popper's theory of the separation of science from non-science. The scientific method, according to Popper, excludes this fallacy of verificationism (which is also called evidential induction). It prescribes, instead, that we attempt to falsify all hypotheses. For more on verificationism, see:
- "Karl Popper: The Problem of Demarcation" – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2021-Mar-18;
- "Comment on 'The falsification of falsification' by Ann Althouse" – Openidname, 2020-Sep; and
- "What is the demarcation problem?": [skip to] A brief history of demarcation – PhilosophicalApologist, 2016.
Here, while seeming to commit perhaps the above-mentioned fallacy of verificationism (i.e., by searching for some evidence to confirm my hypothesis), instead I suggest, for any book of history, that we contemplate all of the dates it mentions (without cherry-picking from them) in order to see whether their associated stories fit (or alternatively falsify) my hypothesis: that a framework of generational abandon-business events influences the course of history. Do the book's meaningful dates fall after the generational events which I hypothesized (even if not particularly closely), so that it's even feasible for the abandon-business events, along with the resulting generational reigns, to have helped to cause the dated events described by the selected history book?
Using the book: Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose & James Lindsay (2020), the abandon-business events (from my hypothesis) that are relevant to the book are:
Event-Year = Last-Birth-Year + Offset – Event – Generation – (Type)
1961 = 1900 + 61 – abandon business – Lost generation – (Damaged)
1985 = 1924 + 61 – abandon business – G.I. generation – (Together)
2003 = 1942 + 61 – abandon business – Silent generation – (Smooth)
Thus 1961, 1985, and 2003 were the beginnings of the reigns of the G.I., Silent, and Baby Boom generations, precisely because the Lost, G.I., and Silent generations (the immediate precursor generations) were abandoning business just then:
1961 = 1900 + 61 – abandon business – Lost generation – (Damaged): This resulted in the reign of the G.I. (Together) generation;
1985 = 1924 + 61 – abandon business – G.I. generation – (Together): This resulted in the reign of the Silent (Smooth) generation; and
2003 = 1942 + 61 – abandon business – Silent generation – (Smooth): This resulted in the reign of the Baby Boom (Authentic) generation.
Below, I've quoted all of the book's mentionings of dates in its history of postmodernism. Regarding the three waves ("postmodernism," "applied postmodernism," and "reified postmodernism") described in the book, a separate abandon-business event does seem indeed to have helped to cause each one. The evidence for this is that the three waves occurred during the reigns respectively of the G.I., Silent, and Baby Boom generations.
Finally, here are the quotations (for review purposes, and please keep in mind the three years of 1961, 1985, and 2003):
"Postmodernism first burst onto the intellectual scene in the late 1960s[,] and quickly became wildly fashionable among leftist and left-leaning academics....After its first big bang beginning in the late 1960s, the high deconstructive phase of postmodernism burn[ed] itself out by the early 1980s....The common wisdom among academics is that, by the 1990s, postmodernism had died. But, in fact, it simply mutated from its earlier high deconstructive phase into a new form....This change occurred as a new wave of Theorists emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s." – pp. 45–6
"Theory, in this sense, has not gone away, but neither has it stayed the same. Between the late 1980s and roughly 2010, it developed the applicability of its underlying concepts[,] and came to form the basis of entirely new fields of scholarship, which have since become profoundly influential." – pp. 46–8
"By losing the ironic playfulness and despair of meaning characteristic of high-deconstructive postmodernism[,] and by becoming goal-oriented, Theorists of the 1980s and 1990s made postmodernism applicable to institutions and politics....After the applied postmodern turn, postmodernism was no longer a mode of describing society and undermining confidence in long-established models of reality: it now aspired to be a tool of Social Justice. This ambition would come to fruition in the early 2010s, when a second significant evolutionary mutation in postmodernism occurred....The intense scrutiny of language and development of ever stricter rules for terminology pertaining to identity often known as political correctness came to a head in the 1990s and has again become pertinent since the mid-2010s....As these methods can be applied to virtually anything, a vast body of work drawing on any (or all) identity-based fields has emerged since roughly 2010." – pp. 61–3
"While, initially, postcolonial Theory scholarship mostly took the form of literary criticism and the discursive analysis of writing about colonialism...the field gradually expanded and simplified. By the early 2000s, the concept of decolonizing everything had begun to dominate scholarship and activism, and new scholars were using and developing the concepts in different ways, with more actionable elements....The aims of postcolonial Theory also became more concrete: focusing less on disrupting discourses they saw as colonialist in the fairly pessimistic way typical of postmodernism[,] and more on taking active steps to decolonize these, using the militant Social Justice approach that has taken hold since 2010." – p. 77
"If we think of the first postmodernists of the late 1960s as a manifestation of radical skepticism and despair[,] and the second wave, from the late 1980s, as a recovery from hopelessness[,] and a drive to make [the] core ideas politically actionable, [then] this third wave, which became prominent between the late 2000s and the early 2010s, has fully recovered its certainty and activist zeal. The first postmodernists were reacting largely to the failure of Marxism, the longstanding analytical framework of the academic left, and suffering from major disillusionment....They therefore sought only to dismantle, deconstruct, and disrupt existing frameworks ironically, with a kind of joyless playfulness. This was the state of cultural thought in the 1970s. By the time this first wave of despairing skepticism—the high deconstructive phase of postmodernism—had worn itself out twenty years later [in the 1990s], the academic left had somewhat recovered hope and was looking for more positive and applicable forms of Theory....Above all else, intersectional feminism sought empowerment through identity politics and collective action, which largely defines the current cultural mood....So, by the 1990s, the applied postmodern turn had arrived, [which] made postmodern Theory actionable, and focused on identity and identity politics. As these Theories developed through the late 1990s into the 2000s within various forms of identity studies...they increasingly combined their aims, to become steadily more intersectional. By the mid-2000s, if you studied one of the key topics...you were expected to factor in all the others....As the 2010s began, the ambiguity and doubt that had characterized postmodernism up until then had almost entirely disappeared[.]" – pp. 184–6
"Social Justice scholarship does not just rely on the two postmodern principles and four postmodern themes: it treats them and their underlying assumptions as morally righteous known-knowns—as The Truth According to Social Justice. It therefore constitutes a third distinct phase of postmodernism, one we have called reified postmodernism because it treats the abstractions at the heart of postmodernism as if they were real truths about society. To understand how the three phases of postmodernism have developed, imagine a tree with deep roots in radical leftist social theory. The first phase, or high deconstructive phase, from the 1960s to the 1980s (usually simply referred to as 'postmodernism'), gave us the tree trunk: Theory. The second phase, from the 1980s to the mid-2000s, which we call applied postmodernism, gave us the branches....In the current, third phase, which began in the mid-2000s, Theory has gone from being an assumption to being The Truth, a truth that is taken for granted. This has given us the leaves of the tree of Social Justice scholarship, which combines the previous approaches as needed....Social Justice scholarship represents the third phase in the evolution of postmodernism. In this new incarnation, postmodernism...now seeks to apply deconstructive methods and postmodernist principles to the task of creating social change, which it pushes into everything.
"[W]hat Social Justice scholars [currently] seem in practice to do is to select certain favored interpretations of marginalized people's experience (those consistent with Theory) and anoint these as the 'authentic' ones; all others are explained away as an unfortunate internalization of dominant ideologies or cynical self-interest...at the price of rendering the Social Justice Theory completely unfalsifiable and indefeasible: [N]o matter what evidence about reality (physical, biological, and social)[,] or philosophical argument may be presented, Theory always can and always does explain it away. It is therefore no exaggeration to observe that Social Justice Theorists have created a new religion, a tradition of faith that is actively hostile to reason, falsification, disconfirmation, and disagreement of any kind. Indeed, the whole postmodernist project now seems, in retrospect, like an unwitting attempt to have deconstructed the old metanarratives of Western thought—science and reason along with religion and capitalist economic systems—to make room for a wholly new religion, a postmodern faith based on a dead God, which sees mysterious worldly forces in systems of power and privilege[,] and which sanctifies victimhood. This, increasingly, is the fundamentalist religion of the nominally secular left." – pp. 207–11
"It is not a coincidence that the applied postmodern turn began in the late 1980s, just as the Civil Rights Movement, liberal feminism, and Gay Pride began to see diminishing returns after twenty years of remarkably rapid progress towards racial, gender, and LGBT equality on a legal and political level. With Jim Crow laws dismantled, Empire fallen, male homosexuality legalized, and discrimination on the grounds of race and sex criminalized, Western society was newly aware and ashamed of its long history of oppression of marginalized groups and wanted to continue righting those wrongs. Since the most significant legal battles had been won, all that remained to tackle were sexist, racist, and homophobic attitudes and discourses. Postmodernism, with its focus on discourses of power and socially constructed knowledge, was perfectly placed to address these." – pp. 230–1
Copyright (c) 2021 Mark D. Blackwell.
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