Will the Future Be Modern?

Will the Future Be Modern?

By Walter Donway

"The contemporary intellectual world is a battlefield between two worldviews: modernism, which upholds reason, science, and individualism—and postmodernism, which denies them." —Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism [1]

A counter-revolution is sweeping Western civilization—it is philosophical at root, cultural in transmission, and political in impact. It has unfolded over centuries, but only now reveals dramatic and unmistakable consequences. Most of us may not recognize it for what it is--erosion of the modernist worldview and ascendance of a postmodernist one. We speak of endless senseless shooting sprees, politically correct reporting, “woke” indoctrination in schools, loss of trust in reason, and noxious scientific fads. We debate the new varieties of collectivism, the politics of “identity,” racial and other quotas in hiring and admissions, cancel culture, rioting and looting as political protest, and the degradation of the university. These are symptoms. The malaise is philosophical: Our civilization of modernism is being sacked; we live in the twilight of its ideals.

What is the modern worldview? It is our legacy from the Age of Enlightenment, the revolution in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries fueled by the impassioned conviction that reason—our faculty of conceptual thought, logic, and evidence—could liberate mankind from faith, superstition, and authoritarian dictation. Reason would unlock the laws of nature (Isaac Newton), the laws of the mind (John Locke), the principles of morality and economics (Adam Smith), and the foundation of government (Locke, Baron Montesquieu). Intellectuals at the time called this world “modern.” And they remade the West.[2]

By happy historical accident, the United States of America is the only nation explicitly founded on Enlightenment ideals. The architects of the American Republic—Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin—were steeped in the writings of the great Roman intellects and Locke, Baron Montesquieu, Cesare Beccaria, and other luminaries of reason. They believed in the primacy of the individual, a constitution limiting government, freedom of speech and press, religious tolerance, property rights, and free trade. This was not a naïve faith in human perfectibility, but an audacious trust in our capacity to discover reality through rational inquiry, shape institutions that respect individual rights, surmount dogma, recalibrate tradition, and oppose tyranny in all its guises.

For a time, the Enlightenment edifice seemed impregnable, but it harbored certain epistemological contradictions that opened it to attack by thinkers including George Berkeley, David Hume, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Ironically, the philosopher often credited as the culmination of Enlightenment thought, Immanuel Kant, though he repeatedly inserted “reason” into the book titles, was its saboteur-in-chief. No one has summarized his mission better than Kant himself: "I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith." A German Lutheran pietist, he declared that reason could not know reality-in-itself. What we know, he argued, are merely phenomena shaped by our mental categories—not the noumenal world, the “thing in itself,” behind appearances. He proposed to resolve Enlightenment contradictions but instead seeded centuries of systematic skepticism and doubt. As Prof. Stephen Hicks shows in Explaining Postmodernism, Kant opened the door wide to philosophical subjectivism, the doctrine that reality is not identified but constructed by our minds.

The seed took root and flourished. The German Idealists—Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel—elevated consciousness as reality’s engine. By the late nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche had declared not only the "death of God" but the collapse of truth itself:

In opposition to Positivism, which halts at phenomena and says, “There are only facts and nothing more,” I would say: No, facts are precisely what is lacking; all that exists consists of interpretations. We cannot establish any fact ‘in itself’: it may even be nonsense to desire to do such a thing. ‘Everything is subjective,’ you say; but that in itself is interpretation.[3]

Karl Marx reimagined ideas as rationalizations of economic interests— “truth” as class propaganda. Sigmund Freud saw reason as but the tip of a psychic iceberg. And Martin Heidegger, among the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, recast truth not as correspondence to reality, but mystical turning-toward-being: “Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the stiff-necked adversary of thought.” He kept philosophers and graduate students busy for decades to come by writing such sentences as “To think Being itself explicitly requires disregarding Being to the extent that it is only grounded and interpreted in terms of beings and for beings as their ground, as in all metaphysics.”

Inheritor of the German Idealist tradition and rector of the University of Freiberg, Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and welcomed Adolf Hitler’s rise as Germany’s spiritual destiny. His philosophical rejection of objective truth and embrace of national “authenticity” and historical destiny offered intellectual shelter for the Nazi worldview. He said in a 1933 speech to students at Freiberg University: “The Fuhrer alone is the present and future German reality and its law. Learn to know ever more deeply: from now on every single thing demands decision, and every action responsibility.”

By the late nineteenth century, German Idealism had invaded and infected American higher education as German universities became the world’s magnet for students preparing for scholarship and teaching. In the nineteenth century, 9,000 to 10,000 American students attended Germany’s best universities—Göttingen, Halle, Leipzig, and Heidelberg. One period historian concludes that “academic networking was the essence of the nineteenth-century German experience,” and that the contemporary university in the United States “was born in direct contact with a foreign culture.” [4]  

At Columbia [University], John William Burgess established the School of Political Science, the nation’s first doctoral program in political science, history, and economics. He received his doctorate at Berlin. He studied under German teachers like Theodor Mommsen and Heinrich von Treitschke, both of whom rejected natural rights philosophy for a view that society generated rights…

[A]t Hopkins, established de novo in 1876…three faculty members, including Richard T. Ely, helped disseminate German philosophy throughout the country and eventually into government. Hopkins trained John Dewey, and Woodrow Wilson, and those who eventually brought progressivism to the University of Wisconsin… Ely went to Madison to establish a new School of Economics, Political Science, and History…Nor were they content simply on winning the battle of ideas. Affiliated economists also orchestrated purges of natural rights theorists and classical liberal economists…History PhD’s would learn to historicize the principles of the American Founding, essentially arguing that they were good for a backward country but not for an advanced, complex modern country… [5]

Although the postulates of ‘postmodernism” were conceived in Königsberg in the 1780s, its contemporary architects are French: Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard are members of the French Communist Party or its ideological orbit. (The term “postmodernism” first laid claim to a philosophical meaning in 1979, with the publication of The Postmodern Condition by Jean-François Lyotard.) As Hicks argues, their philosophical stance—epistemic skepticism, the rejection of objective truth, the idea that ideology is a mask for power—arrived as salvation of Marxism. Discredited in theory by its internal contradictions and in practice by its catastrophic results—Khrushchev’s revelation of millions of victims of Stalin’s crimes, the brutal suppression of revolts for freedom in Hungary and elsewhere, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the starvation and repression in North Korea and Cuba—classical Marxism was bankrupt. 

Postmodernism became the new rhetorical banner of old collectivist aims, but where economic class had failed, race, gender, and culture could step in. The result is neo-Marxism, waging war against Western liberal civilization—its history, race relations, individualism, capitalism, science and technology, and perceived male hierarchy. Herbert Marcuse foresaw it: when Marxism lost the final public battle (the New Left) in the 1960s, it would take refuge in the universities. Why did Marxism seek salvation by replanting its roots deep in postmodernist philosophy? Most obviously because postmodernism’s epistemic skepticism dismissed talk about “reality” and divorced ideology from “truth.” Not undefinable “truth” about “reality,” but exercising power is the “meaning”: of ideology; so, let’s have no more painful discussions of communist economic catastrophes, starvation, slave labor, and gulags. 

More subtly, however, postmodernism is not a philosophy accessible to lay readers or, indeed, to professional philosophers. In a telling conclusion, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains that “postmodernists openly respond to [their foremost critic, Jürgen Habermas,]…due to the fact that he takes postmodernism seriously and does not, like other critics, reject it as mere nonsense. Indeed, that he can read postmodernist texts closely and discursively testifies to their intelligibility.”  Intelligible perhaps but far removed from propositions graspable by anyone wishing to challenge the philosophical premises of the postmodernist agenda in virtually every area of life. [6]

In the wake of World War II, German neo-Marxists migrated to the United States. The Frankfurt School—scholars such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse—condemns Enlightenment reason as a tool of domination: "instrumental rationality" serveing capitalism, patriarchy, and fascism. Reason, far from emancipating man, enslaves him to systems. Marcuse in particular, championed what he called "liberation through intolerance"—the idea that free speech and debate must yield to revolutionary change. It is a doctrine now taught not in revolutionary cells, but in Ivy League classrooms.  As early as 1993, Hoover Institution scholar Thomas Sowell, in Inside American Education: The Decline, the Deception, the Dogmas, pointed to the logical consequences: 

Harvard is “…all too typical of elite institutions, in permitting the politically correct to use storm trooper tactics against the politically incorrect….

These are systematic patterns of stilling free speech and preventing academic audiences from hearing anything which challenges the prevailing vision of the left currently monopolizing many elite colleges and universities.[7]

In The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture, Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow, Heather Mac Donald, documents this transformation. [8] The modern university—once guardian of Western intellectual, literary, and humanistic traditions—has surrendered its liberal foundations of open inquiry, intellectual diversity, and the search for truth. Where once prevailed a humanistic tradition, now festers “deconstructionism” in literature, postmodernist historiography, and decolonization campaigns. College administration has become racial and gender quotas, identity-based hiring, speech codes, and a curriculum of grievance studies.  

Mac Donald gives examples: literature courses with literature replaced by anti-colonial theory; English departments where Shakespeare is studied primarily through race and gender lenses; administrators who suppress dissent through “bias response teams”; and protests that turn violent when mainstream speakers like Charles Murray, Heather Mac Donald herself, or even Bret Weinstein are invited to speak. This is not hyperbole—it is documented fact.

Few choose to dissent at the price of near-universal moral condemnation—and ostracism and harassment. Dr. Peter Boghossian, a Portland State University professor of philosophy for a decade, quit the faculty and in an open letter to the provost charged that the university has “transformed a bastion of free inquiry into a Social Justice Factory whose only inputs [are]…race, gender, and victimhood and whose only outputs [are]…grievance and division.” He wrote that students are not taught to think but “trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues.” And the faculty and administration, he wrote, “drive the intolerance of divergent beliefs and opinions…. This has created a culture of offense where students are now afraid to speak openly and honestly.” [9]

The crisis came home to supporters of universities with the pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli demonstrations on campuses across the United States. Major university contributors, long faithful financial backers of institutions like Harvard, Penn, and Columbia, reacted with open dismay. But the students’ perspective, far from spontaneous, reflected the teachings of postmodernist historiography in which they had been steeped: Israel was the Western, technologically dominant, colonialist oppressor; the Palestinians were the racialized, impoverished, overpowered victims. Students interpreted the conflict not from history's perspective, but through the prism of power and “oppression”—the prism postmodern theory applies to every issue from gender to science to literature. Students were not protesting an event; they were reenacting a worldview.[10] As one contributor put it bluntly, "I didn’t give tens of millions to watch antisemitism dressed up as decolonial theory paraded through the quad."

The irony is that the West’s intellectual inheritance—its tradition of skeptical, self-correcting inquiry—is now denounced as a white, Eurocentric "narrative." Foucault described truth as "a system of ordered procedures for production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements"—in short, a function of power.[11] In this view, the claim that there are two biological sexes becomes "violence." The notion of objectivity is rejected as a "male" construct. And in the age of AI, when machines trained on logic and data increasingly shape our world, we celebrate emotional "lived experience" as the only authentic knowledge.

This is not an epidemic of rabies. It is the consequence of a nuanced philosophical tradition—postmodernism—taken seriously and applied broadly. The result is the dismantling of the modern, Age of Enlightenment worldview. A society that abandons belief in the reality of truth has no incentive to reason together. A polity that denies individualism cannot comprehend individual rights. A culture that embraces epistemic skepticism, disbelief in the possibility of knowledge, has no concept of beauty or justice.

The postmodern worldview is that knowledge is a social construction, all identity a political imposition, and any claim to truth a power play. The goal cannot be rational persuasion; the goal is domination.

The human hunger that once propelled the Age of Enlightenment, the passion to understand the world, to apply reason to all that touches our lives, has not vanished. Nor has the revolt against reason breached the citadel and slain the last defenders. But the modern world must retreat to its philosophical base and from there mount a counter-attack.

Or the future will not be modern.

Endnotes:

[1] Hicks, Stephen R.C. Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. https://www.stephenhicks.org/publications/book-explaining-postmodernism/

[2] Donway, Walter. How Philosophers Change Civilizations: The Age of Enlightenment. (New York: Romantic Revolution Books, 2024). https://www.amazon.com/How-Philosophers-Change-Civilizations-Enlightenment/dp/B0CXSY9W39

[3] Viscomi, Marco. “Nietzsche’s Critique of Positivism.” Catholic University Center, Rome. https://www.teseopress.com/existenceandtheone/chapter/nietzsches-critique-of-positivism-the-dialectical-unity-of-the-existent/

[4] Werner, Anja. The Transatlantic World of Higher Education: Americans at German Universities, 1776-1914 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013). https://dgfa.de/anja-werner-the-transatlantic-world-of-higher-education-americans-at-german-universities-1776-1914-reviewed-by-annette-g-aubert/

[5] Yenor, Scott. “The German Invasion in Social Science.” The Liberty Fund, February 6, 2024.                  https://lawliberty.org/book-review/the-german-invasion-in-social-science/

[6] Aylesworth, Gary. “Postmodernism.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, February 5, 2015. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/

[7] Sowell, Thomas. Inside American Education: The Decline, the deception, the dogmas. https://archive.org/details/insideamericaned00sowe/page/n3/mode/2up

[8] Mac Donald, Heather. The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture. Manhattan Institute. https://manhattan.institute/book/the-diversity-delusion

[9] Donway, Walter. “Dissenting Academic? How Universities Can Expel You.” Savvy Street, September 12, 2021. https://www.thesavvystreet.com/dissenting-academic-how-universities-can-expel-you/

[10] Donway, Walter. “Postmodernism Historiography “On the March” in Student Demonstrations,” Savvy Street, December 29, 2023. https://www.thesavvystreet.com/postmodernist-historiography-on-the-march-in-student-demonstrations-for-palestine/

[11] Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Pantheon Books.  https://archive.org/details/powerknowledgese0000fouc_v9d7

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