Gate Six: True and False Modernism — Postmodernism

From the book Two Wagons and a Hot Air Balloon by Rabbi Michael Avraham. Translated from Hebrew using gpt-5.4 (reasoning_effort=high, batch API).

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Authentic and Spurious Modernism: Postmodernism

This gate contains one chapter, followed by a literary intermezzo.

Introduction

In the fourth gate, I quoted the remarks of Bechler and Sternhell, who criticized postmodernity from a secular modernist standpoint. What lies behind their remarks is the claim that identifying secularism with postmodern emptiness—that is, with the absence of binding values—is unjustified. At times one even gets the impression that secularism constitutes a condition with greater moral potential than a synthetic belief in some absolute set of values.

Their claim operated on two levels:

1. This identification is not necessary, because there is such a thing as modernist secularism, which also believes in values (it too is an alternative “full wagon”).
2. A postmodern outlook does not help moral conduct, and in fact is highly dangerous in this respect. They argued that in the absence of values there are no brakes against immorality either. This is one aspect of the same paradox built into analytic positions, which we have mentioned several times: one cannot turn emptiness itself into a binding value.

In this gate we shall address the modernist critique of postmodernism. It is important to note that the criticism discussed here is criticism from a secular-leftist, liberal standpoint. This book too is, of course, a critique of postmodernity, but it is written from a synthetic perspective. My claim in this gate will be that criticism from a liberal standpoint is unjustified. Even when I speak here about criticism of postmodernism in general, I mean criticisms emerging from the secular, leftist, liberal direction.

This gate is also addressed to that part of the readership that feels that the critique presented here may perhaps be justified with regard to postmodernity, but that the identification of secularism and the left with postmodern skepticism is unjustified. Many secular people feel that they themselves are not skeptics, and that they do have principles in which they believe. Many express this by means of the metaphor that their secular “wagon” is not empty.¹ These, like Taub, identify themselves with secular modernism, or with the old Enlightenment. What is said in this gate is meant to join what was described in the previous two gates (and in the prologue), in order to persuade those readers that this is usually not the case. The values in which they believe are also Bokononist pseudo-values. The central branches of Western secularism are plainly analytic.

The main claim we shall try to clarify here (see also the end of the previous gate) is that, contrary to widespread belief, there is almost no synthetic left-wing secularism, or synthetic liberalism. We shall see that even the theoretical, a priori possibility of their existence is rather slight.

In other words, we shall address here the two claims made by Bechler and Sternhell, and show that their second claim is entirely correct: such a condition is dangerous, as we have already seen in the discussion of tolerance in the fourth gate, and it raises serious fears of immoral behavior, or at the very least casts doubt on the consistency of those who behave morally from such a worldview. By contrast, their first claim is not at all correct. The transition from modernism to postmodernism is not an accidental slide, nor some sort of “historical accident.” As we have already seen, it is a necessary transition. In fact, as we shall see in the third section, from a philosophical (meta-ideological) standpoint there is almost no possibility of synthetic secularism. Here we shall try to show the same thing through an analysis of liberal ideologies and values: we shall see that even someone who defines himself as a left-wing secular modernist usually holds a disguised postmodern worldview.

The discussion will be based on Gadi Taub’s book The Slouching Rebellion, which contains various formulations of critiques like those of Bechler and Sternhell in a more detailed, reasoned, and systematic form. The second part of The Slouching Rebellion is wholly devoted to this point. For that reason it will be convenient to address the modernist-secular critique of postmodernity as it appears there, although for our purposes these arguments serve only as a representative model for the entire modernist critique of postmodernity, which appears in different forms and contexts, usually less systematically.

Chapter One: The Modernist Critique of Postmodernism

Introduction

In the introduction to the first gate, we mentioned Gadi Taub’s book The Slouching Rebellion, where he criticizes postmodern approaches, also called “politically correct” (P.C.), the “new Enlightenment,” and the like.² In light of what has been said here, it seems that he goes only half the distance. His claim that there is a liberal, modernist alternative—the “old Enlightenment”—to the new Enlightenment is not acceptable to me. Classical Enlightenment is exposed to a similar critique as well. As we saw in the previous chapters, liberal modernism contains within itself the “new Enlightenment” as the expected consequence of the Nietzschean process described above.

The essence of Taub’s critique consists of arguments that parallel, to one degree or another, part of what will be presented in the next section. The main difference stems from the fact that Taub formulates the critique on the ideological level and not on the philosophical one. Because he does not deal with the philosophical level, he identifies and classifies the forces operating along the modern-postmodern axis imprecisely. For the same reason, the modernism he represents is nothing more than soft postmodernism. In light of what we have seen throughout the present section, the modernism that dominated Western culture until the rise of postmodernism in recent decades is in fact a spurious modernism, or postmodernism covered by a fig leaf.

Taub’s doctrine, like secular modernism in general, is a somewhat more moderate expression of the same phenomenon that I call here “analyticity.” I would like to sharpen the conclusions of the previous gate and argue that the contrast Taub draws between himself and the believers in political correctness is not as dramatic as he presents it. The values in which he himself believes are also a case of Bokononism—that is, pseudo-values.

Taub’s Own Words

In the first chapter of the second part of his book, after presenting examples of typical P.C. arguments, Taub sets modernism (the old Enlightenment) and postmodernism (the new Enlightenment) over against one another, and writes as follows:

In parenthesis it should be noted that because the injustices at issue are injuries to liberal values, to the democratic West’s fundamental belief in freedom and equality, a common journalistic mistake is to see claims such as that of Shitrit [= Sami Shalom Chetrit, who argues that Jews of Middle Eastern origin and their culture suffer educational and other discrimination in Israel], or those of the new feminism, as a radical arm of the liberal worldview. A militant wing that, in the name of the universality of freedom and equality, demands their full and complete implementation so that injustices may be corrected and the deprived compensated…

For our purposes here, it is enough to say that this [= the mistake] stems from the fact that the attack on norms, conceptions, and stereotypes that oppress women, or blacks, or Jews of Middle Eastern origin, is shared by this current and by liberal thought. But the difference is nonetheless decisive. Liberalism attacks certain norms in the name of universal values—values that, liberalism believes, ought to be applied to all human beings… By contrast, the attack made by the new positions, which are our concern here, is an attack on the very existence of universal values. It is an attack on liberalism’s very pretension to regard its own values as truths that claim to represent the interests of all human beings equally, although in fact, so we are told, they represent the interests of the ruling group—that is, white, Western, Protestant males.

What is now being offered in place of universal values is relativism. Values, according to these new outlooks, are a local matter, internal to a culture. Every culture and every society has its own values, and there is no external, objective criterion by which to rank such value systems on a scale of superiority and inferiority…

Once we recognize the relativity and locality of values, the fact that different societies and groups hold different values that are no better and no worse than “ours,” we will stop discriminating against women, or behaving condescendingly toward the peoples of the East, and we will stop seeing ourselves as entitled to invade foreign societies in order to “re-educate” them, or enlighten them with our enlightened tidings. Other outlooks are no more local, primitive, or inferior. They are simply different. And just like all these value systems, Western values too are merely local values, created by certain groups in a specific time and place, in order to suit our needs and certain interests.

All this sounds just and appealing to the Western ear. For it seems that the immediate implication of relativity is tolerance. Once we recognize the absence of absolute moral truths, we will stop being condescending and oppressive, and live together in peace and mutual respect. True, we will lose the hope of total solutions to our distress, but we will gain a compromise one can live with: live and let live.

But this intuition is misleading, because it does not take into account the fact that those other value systems can themselves be intolerant. And positions of this sort encounter this trap at every turn. Here is a simple example from the Israeli press: in his article “Murder in the Neighboring Yard” in Haaretz, Dani Rabinowitz argued… that we are not entitled to judge the brother of Ikhlas Kanaan, who murdered his sister in the name of family honor, because we must not impose our value system on the Druze… Condemning the murder is cultural condescension.

Among those who objected to Rabinowitz’s article were not only traditional liberals who believe in universal values, but also members of the feminist wing of these same new positions. They argued that Rabinowitz imagines he is protecting the Druze from Jewish-Israeli-Western oppression, but in fact he is a partner in the Jewish-Arab-Western oppression of women. Rabinowitz’s response to the feminists was just as predictable: feminism, he wrote, “divides the world in only one meaningful way—women versus their attackers. (…) Israeli feminists relate to Arab peoples in Orientalist terms” [that is, the way the West relates to Eastern peoples with cultural condescension, according to Edward Said’s book Orientalism]. But how are we to decide which division is the more important one? Which deprivation should determine matters here: the deprivation of the Druze, or the deprivation of women? Therefore the problem of tolerance toward intolerance, in a world where there is no guiding moral principle beyond tolerance itself, is insoluble…

The long passage quoted here contains the main elements of Taub’s argument that are relevant to our purposes, and so we shall begin by addressing them.

Between a Moral Conception and a Logical-Philosophical Position

Let us begin specifically with the conclusion: the “common journalistic mistake” that identifies postmodernity as a radical current within liberalism is not as mistaken as Taub thinks. In the previous gates we saw that the two currents share a common philosophical root: analyticity. The old Enlightenment, the modernist one, which ostensibly believes in values, is in fact also founded on an illusion. We also saw that postmodernism is the avant-garde marking the direction of development of the entire liberal camp. In the absence of a coordinate system—after the “death of God”—there is no way to examine and adopt value systems. The liberal system proposed by Taub does not survive theoretical scrutiny or rationalization. This is the theoretical void of analyticity, on which we have already dwelt several times. We shall now see this again in light of the passage quoted above.

As a point of departure, it is important to notice that the debate Taub conducts with the P.C. camp is not conducted on the philosophical plane, but on the moral one. He sees them as adopting the analytic-skeptical philosophical position only in order to achieve moral ends, whereas he attacks them on the grounds that they do not attain the expected moral results. There is no discussion at all of whether the skeptical stance is truly justified, philosophically or otherwise, or whether perhaps the liberal stance is justified instead. Both sides alike use values and philosophical beliefs as instruments of morality. This debate recalls the Kantian approach that sees God as an idea—indeed, a fictional one—whose entire role is merely to preserve and ground moral conduct. Ahad Ha’am’s doctrine, which regarded religion as a fictional idea whose role is to preserve the nation, moves in a similar direction. All of these use theory, beliefs, and even logic as instruments for attaining values. We shall later see that this is precisely the pragmatist “philosophy” underlying Western analyticity.

But a philosophical worldview is not an instrument for achieving anything whatsoever, even if those things are moral values, however important. Surprisingly enough, a philosophical worldview is the system of beliefs held by someone who actually believes them. From it he derives his conclusions; it is not itself derived from those conclusions.³

Both sides—the postmodern side and Taub with the secular-liberal modernism he represents—relate to values instrumentally, something that, as we saw in the previous gate, contradicts the very meaning of the concept “value.” As Yeshayahu Leibowitz argued there, a value is always an end, never a means to something else.

Dani Rabinowitz, whom Taub quotes and attacks, probably really does believe in the relativity of values, regardless of the moral effects of such a view. Theoretically, there is ostensibly no room to attack him for that, at least not on the intellectual plane. By contrast, the other P.C. thinkers, who nevertheless condemn such acts, are of course victims of the Bokononist fallacy to which we pointed earlier. That is the meaning of Dani Rabinowitz’s internal criticism of them. Taub himself, who criticizes Rabinowitz, among other things, for the same reasons, in fact falls into the same fallacy that Rabinowitz finds in his postmodern colleagues. His values are a technical instrument for attaining moral ends.

This phenomenon is symptomatic of the analytic world. In the absence of any objective criteria whatsoever, we must adopt values according to the moral or other benefits that can be extracted from them. Since one believes in nothing, beliefs can be adopted pragmatically in order to achieve a life as comfortable and useful as possible.⁴ We thus see that Taub does not differ in this respect from his postmodern colleagues. In his doctrine too, values are fluid, and we choose them, along with the philosophy that envelopes them, according to the efficiency of their use for previously marked-out ends. Later we shall see another passage in Taub where he explicitly endorses such an approach, in his discussion of American pragmatism.

Taub’s criticism is indeed correct and justified on another plane. The demand made by the P.C. camp that the rest of the world conform to their relativist worldview shows that they themselves are not entirely skeptical. In their skeptical principle itself they have wholly certain belief. On that level, Dani Rabinowitz ought simply to have kept silent, despite not identifying with what was being done, and not criticize his colleagues who think differently (see the more detailed discussion in the third section).

Two Kinds of Values, or: Values and “Values”

Taub presents himself as different from these types. If we try to probe the depth of the difference—which according to Taub rests on belief in absolute values—and look for an explicit expression of it, we find, as expected, only the following values: freedom, equality, and democracy. We saw in chapter 2 of the previous gate that these “values” concern the framework and not the contents. In that sense they are not values at all. Taub and his allegedly “modernist” companions too have despaired of any substantive values. In his desperation he merely embraces the last anchor of democratic framework-values, in order, as noted, to make existence possible in the anarchic world created after the death of God. Once again we encounter the postmodern subordination of values and beliefs to pragmatic ends.

Democracy is a mode of coexistence for people who hold differing or even contradictory values. But which values exactly should democracy permit to coexist side by side? Taub has no other value to offer us. Perhaps self-actualization, or artistic creation—but these too are not values in the ordinary sense. Taub and his friends would not propose sanctions against one who fails to fulfill them, except against one who denies them to someone else. The supposedly “modernist” values of Taub and his friends are entirely negative and passive. All the values are prohibitions—“thou shalt nots”—based on the ban against causing suffering or harm to another.

One indication that these “values” are of a different kind from classical values—for example, religious values—is the question of what happens once the optimal state has been achieved, a state in which freedom and equality already reign for all the world’s inhabitants. What then would Western and democratic “values” be in such a world?

Ephraim Kishon, in his book Scapegoat, describes the formation of a party that sets itself the goal of a value to which we all aspire: getting rid of bald people. He writes as follows:[^58]

“To be perfectly frank,” Papi announced from the depths of my bed, “we must declare that only one principle serves as our guiding light: the liberation of our country from the yoke of bald people.”

“This idea will steel our nation and create internal unity,” I offered my opinion.

“Exactly so,” replied Dr. Shimkovitz. “The idea is wonderful, no doubt. But what will our program of action be after we have definitively eliminated the camp of the bald?”

Papi and I exchanged embarrassed glances. In truth, we had never given the matter any thought. Indeed, it had been very wise of us to add a professional to our ranks.

“The bald can never be defeated once and for all,” I finally defended the basic idea…

“That is another reason why it is highly desirable to include additional clauses in our platform, apart from those connected with the great central idea…”

A world of values is a world whose existence has some basic meaning, not merely negative-passive meaning. It is impossible to found a world of values on the removal of negative things. What is the goal we will attain once the negative things are removed? Why should we remove them at all?[^\59]

Value-Parasitism

The reader is invited, as a thought experiment, to examine what an Israeli party such as Meretz, for example, and the public it represents, would do once there were no longer demons threatening democracy and equality. What would then be the purpose of their existence? I would not wish to live in a society in such a state. It is highly likely that a massive wave of suicides would break out, stemming from the perception of life as devoid of meaning and purpose. One sees clearly that specifically the various “clerical” and “negative” factors are what enable liberalism, and political correctness as well, to survive and endure. The justification for the existence of liberals lies solely in the existence of violations of liberal values. In an equal and liberal world, no values would remain for them, and their existence would have no value-laden meaning.

It is interesting that Taub himself argues of the P.C. camp that they tend to attack precisely those few people belonging to weak social strata who have succeeded in advancing and improving their status. He argues against them that the P.C. person needs the existence of victimhood as a permanent condition, all in order to preserve Kishon’s dictum: “The bald can never be defeated once and for all.” The P.C. person dare not allow any poor victim to improve his condition, for without victims his own existence has no meaning at all. It seems that the same is true of liberals like Taub himself. They too feed off the suffering and the discriminated-against. Were such people not to exist, modernists too would find no value-laden meaning in their lives. What would they struggle over in the name of the absolute values of freedom, equality, and democracy?

It seems that there is something deeper here still. Precisely humanistic liberalism, which, as we have seen, places the individual human being at the center, grounds its entire value-laden existence on the other person, on the existence of another. All its “values,” in one way or another, concern what one ought—or more accurately, ought not—to do to another. Without another person, the liberal has no values. He thus seems to live in contradiction: his position, which places the individual at the center (and as we saw in note 15 above, this is also an ontological stance), specifically requires the other in order to establish its world of values.

It may be that these liberal “values,” which demand that one not interfere with, and not cause harm or suffering to, another, are actually intended to establish all the more forcefully the liberal’s own selfhood. He does not want to disturb another so that his own selfhood, or ego, will not be harmed, so that, God forbid, he should not cease to stand alone in ontological space. So that, God forbid, ties should not be created that would undermine his “I” (and that of others) as the most basic and important entity. This too is a kind of self-expression.

According to this, it seems that on a deeper level not only the other person’s victimhood is required by the liberal in order to establish his world of values, a world that places the individual and himself at the center. Absurd as it sounds, the very existence of the other is what constitutes him. He needs the other in order to distinguish himself from him—just as every Jew, even on a deserted island, needs two synagogues nearby: one in which he will pray, and one in which he will not pray.

In the previous gate we saw that communism, like the liberal West, is afflicted by this problem. Once equality is achieved, it has nothing to say about what each individual ought to do in such a situation. If so, why fight for equality at all? We already argued above that even Rousseau, who was prepared to die for my right to say what I think, despite disagreeing with it, cannot do so in a world where what I say is devoid of essential meaning. Why die for my right to say meaningless things? He is willing to do so specifically because he does not agree with my views. But someone who neither disagrees with nor supports any view whatsoever does not sound coherent when he declares his willingness to die for my ability to express such a view.

Those “additional clauses in the platform” of which Kishon speaks at the end of the passage are actually the central clauses, not the marginal ones. In the chapter on tolerance (see Gate Four), we saw that openness, like democracy, can function as framework-values—if there are such things at all—only in a world where substantive values exist. We want to make substantive values possible by means of liberal democracy, freedom, and equality because we believe that this is the best framework for their development. Bokononism is the transformation of framework-values—the “values,” in quotation marks—into the only substantive values. We thus get a framework that serves no purpose. The purpose of the framework is merely to survive, and nothing more.

It should be noted that there is no criticism here. This is simply a diagnosis, or a description of a state of affairs. One who does not believe in values or certainties cannot adopt them merely in order to give meaning and purpose to life. That is an instrumental conception of values, like that of the false modernists and their postmodern cousins, and it contradicts the very essence of the concept “value.” What we wished to point out here is simply the great proximity that does in fact exist, contrary to Taub’s claim, between liberal modernism (“the old Enlightenment” in Taub’s language) and postmodernism (“the new Enlightenment”).

We can now move one step further in our critique. We have reached the conclusion that the “values” Taub offers as a modernist alternative to postmodernity are merely framework-values. They lack substantive content. We have seen that in the absence of substantive values there is no philosophical-theoretical point in preserving the framework. We shall now see that not only is there no point in it; it is impossible.

Taub tries to ignore the unavoidable conclusions of Western democratic analytic culture. In a world in which God is dead, and therefore there are no absolute values, one cannot reasonably ground even the framework within which that absence of values exists. In a world where all values have collapsed under postmodern doubt, framework-values too cannot be given genuine philosophical justification. How does Taub propose to ground these values themselves? How does he see them as exempt from the same essential doubt that accompanies every value-system as such?

This is once again the Bokononist fallacy, this time within the ostensibly modernist worldview. Within the modernist worldview of the age of reason and Enlightenment, which seemingly advocates values as an alternative to the religious systems that preceded it, there lies in fact the same fallacy we described in the postmodern world. We shall elaborate further on this at the beginning of the next section.

To summarize: liberal systems of “values” are a framework within which there is nothing at all. We have noted three main points concerning them:

1. These “values” are not values in the classical sense, but “values”—that is, framework-values.
2. In the absence of any possibility of grounding substantive values with certainty, there is also no logical way to ground framework-values.
3. Even if there were such a way of grounding them, it would still be implausible to advocate a bare framework that is not meant to attain any concrete content, and whose worth lies merely in its own existence.

The Force of “Values”: Passive Values

Another characteristic of liberal systems of “values,” though related to the previous ones, is that they consist mainly of negative, passive values. They contain only prohibitions, and essentially no positive commandments. Of course it is desirable to act on behalf of another person’s equality and freedom, but there is no demand made of one who fails to do so—except of one who actively infringes these rights. Beyond that, even action on behalf of another is aimed only at improving frameworks, and contains no positive, active, substantive content that could also give content to the framework. Such a system tells us only what must not be done, not what ought to be done.

On the subject of negative, or passive, values, I will bring here a story I once heard on a recording by Rabbi Amnon Yitzhak. One morning at dawn, the rabbi of the town arose, slaughtered a sheep, covered it with a prayer shawl, laid it covered on the road, and began to cry bitterly: “The righteous man has died! Whose heart will not tremble?” and he went on crying this way all the time. The townspeople awoke little by little from their sleep, and when they saw the rabbi crying over the righteous man who had died, they joined him and began to lament and wail as well.

The funeral procession set out in cries and tears. When they reached the grave and removed the prayer shawl covering the sheep, they all saw that this “righteous man” was nothing but a sheep. At the sight of this, their anger began to rise, and they demanded an explanation from the rabbi. The rabbi said to them: When I rebuke you for not observing the commandments of the Torah (the divine law), for prayer without concentration, Sabbath observance, Torah study, and so forth, you always tell me that you are perfectly fine. You claim that you are complete righteous people: you do not steal, murder, extort, or harm anyone. This sheep too was “righteous” in exactly the same way: it did not steal, it did not murder, it did not extort, it did not speak evil speech about others, it did not harm anyone, and so on. If so, why are you angry?

This folk tale is a wonderful illustration of the notion of passive values. The townspeople saw themselves as “fine” because they harmed no one. In modern language we would say that they admirably upheld the values of equality, freedom, and democracy. The rabbi argued against them that this is exactly what the sheep does too. It too violates none of the prohibitions. The question is what about the positive commandments, the ones that give content to the entire framework of prohibitions. Prohibitions serve to distance us from forbidden things, but they are only a means toward the active service of God, that is, toward the fulfillment of the positive commandments.⁵

The lesson of this story is that doing nothing cannot count as a life of values. Negative values are fulfilled, perhaps even better, by sheep as well. This is precisely Taub’s claim against the P.C. camp, and it is also our claim here against Taub’s own liberalism: Taub too represents an analytic position, though a more moderate one. As stated, a system composed entirely of prohibitions cannot be called a “system of values,” because it cannot give life positive value-laden meaning.

At this point someone may object that the correlation between negative values, or the absence of values, and secularism is not necessary. Theoretically there is room on the map for a group that upholds positive values and yet does not do so on a religious basis. This may perhaps be true in principle, but in practice there seems to be no significant group of this sort. If we examine the values of nearly all groups that uphold secular values, we find that these are negative-instrumental-framework “values,” not values in the classical sense.

It is important to note that this is not a mere accident. There are good reasons for it on the philosophical plane, and we shall discuss them in the next section. On the plane of values, which is our concern here, one may say that the reason is that positive values are necessarily directed toward reaching some “place,” a place outside myself. To serve God, for example, means to draw near to Him—or, in ordinary religious language, to cleave to Him. This is a value that lies outside me, and therefore it can be posited only by an entity that lies outside me. A person who believes in an anthropocentric world—a world in which the human being stands at the center, without God—is unlikely to have any significant source for positive values. Objective and meaningful purpose in life can be given only by someone who stands outside it—perhaps only by the one who created it. A person who creates meaning for himself will receive nothing more than a relative, context-dependent “value.”

A person living in a world of analytic “values” resembles Baron Munchausen, who fell into a pit and, in order to get out, pulled himself up by his own hair and thus escaped from it. From another of his stories it appears that the only alternative is to run home, fetch a ladder, and then climb out of the pit in order to reach the moon. About this the Sages said: “A prisoner cannot free himself from prison.” In an anthropocentric world, a person can advocate only complete skepticism (the absence of values), negative-passive “values” without any serious theoretical foundation, or at most self-expression and self-actualization, which is the liberal value closest to the classical notion of a positive value. But as we remarked above, no one imposes sanctions for failing to fulfill such a “value,” and in that sense this is not a classical positive value. It is merely a recommendation for a proper way of life, though it is not at all clear in what sense.⁶

Once again, and even more forcefully, we encounter the emptiness of the liberal-secular “wagon” in the sense proposed above. This “wagon” is empty of positive values. As stated, it has no way of reaching them and cleaving to them, and certainly no way of grounding them theoretically. One can see that this phenomenon does in fact appear in the reality around us: the secular public generally has negative values. There is not, in truth, an alternative wagon here in the same sense as the religious wagon. Passive absence is frozen into place as an alternative to the classical religious-synthetic value system, which is positive in essence. The crises of contemporary Zionism are a reflection of this very problem: in a liberal world one cannot preach chauvinism, or the importance of living in a particular land, or the formation of a people. One may perhaps ask to take part in all this, and even write heroic poems about it. But one cannot see any of these things as binding values.

When Abraham came to Egypt in the portion “Go Forth,” he said, “If there is no God in this place, they will kill me.” In a place where there is no God, there cannot be real values. There is no positive, value-laden alternative to the religious wagon. Even those who still preserve the framework as a quasi-value system, and therefore will not kill even where there is no God, are in a temporary and unstable condition. The avant-garde of this conception already points out the direction of progress and draws its full conclusions. It denies even the validity of the framework. It will not intervene when people are murdered in the name of family honor within a different cultural framework.

Earlier we noted that the emptiness of the secular wagon is not necessarily an expression of moral emptiness, that is, of improper behavior. The interpretation we proposed was that it is philosophical emptiness. Here we are beginning to see that philosophical emptiness, though not necessarily bound up with a moral vacuum, is certainly prone to deteriorate into one—as Taub, Sternhell, and Bechler also warned.

The Validity of “Tolerance”

Continuing the passage quoted above, Taub proposes, unlike the P.C. camp, tolerance only toward other tolerant positions.⁷ According to him, intolerant positions should not enjoy the luxuries of liberalism and Western tolerance. This is the main thrust of his criticism of Dani Rabinowitz’s claim in Haaretz. The question that arises here is, of course: who remains? Toward whom may one behave tolerantly? Only toward groups that believe in purely passive value systems, like liberalism itself? If so, that is tolerance only toward oneself, or toward those who do not disturb you. Every group that believes in something at all—in our terms, every synthetic group—contains an element of intolerance, at least in principle. According to Taub, such a group is not worthy of tolerant treatment.

According to Taub, the liberal is not required to be tolerant toward anyone with whom he genuinely disagrees, indeed toward anyone who genuinely believes in some positive, active value beyond the negative-passive prohibition against harming another. Tolerance applies only to those who, at the essential level, agree with me exactly. Truly a lofty morality, and a genuine “value alternative” to outdated clerical values. It is worth noticing that this “tolerance” constitutes almost the entire value system of the analytic thinker. And as we see here, it too says nothing. See the parallel argument on this point above, in Gate Four, Chapter Three. It is not at all clear what value alternative Taub is speaking about. When one examines it more deeply, one discovers an analytic vacuum with a meager shell of framework “values.”

The Common Root of Modernity and Postmodernity

Let us now look at another passage from Taub (ibid., p. 257):

…one of the important and direct sources of P.C. in American culture itself, in this century… this fashionable American relativism is not only a transformation of European deconstruction, not only an offspring of the Frankfurt School, and not only a continuation of one or another romantic movement. It is also a product of the idea of pluralism in its American version, in the form it took in the hands of Dewey’s generation.

John Dewey and his generation, like Isaiah Berlin in Europe, preached pluralism because they saw in it a defense against utopian thinkers. They sought to fortify the democratic ethos against bearers of total visions, which produced regimes of terror in Europe at the beginning of the century. Democracy’s strength, according to this outlook, lies in the fact that it does not recognize absolute truths, and serves as an arena for constant debate among outlooks… The advantage of the American method is that it refuses to begin from a value premise, from an a priori universal value, and instead examines values by their results. This flexibility, this refusal to set universal values in stone, and this constant negotiation among opposites, are what prevent individuals and groups from forcibly imposing values that are supposedly “absolute”… This view saw the ability of opposites to live together and reach a pragmatic compromise—a sort of businessmen’s compromise—as the heart of democracy.

But what enabled Dewey and his generation to abandon the universal concept and nevertheless not arrive at total relativism and nihilism was their automatic, stable, self-justifying faith in democracy. Democracy, in this sense, was for them an idea of universal validity… Pragmatism, the examination of values by their results, meant, according to this view, examining values according to the extent to which they do or do not contribute to the strengthening and improvement of American democracy as this generation wished to see it. Because democracy—and in their eyes this was entirely self-evident—is the path to social justice… In this way it became possible to attack the idea of universality without abandoning it entirely: one could continue to hold onto a non-relative anchor—democracy—so that a moral stance would remain possible.

The P.C. camp lost that anchor. It lost the optimistic spirit that characterized Dewey’s generation, the faith in progress and reason, and above all the stable faith in the American ethos…

Difficult as it is to believe—yes, the passage was written from a position supportive of pragmatist ideas. Quite innocently, Taub describes them in a rather ridiculous way. This passage describes the Bokononist revolution in the making. This, precisely, is what Taub and many others regard as the value-root of modernist democratic liberalism. The principles of the framework become values in a world where there are no other content-values. According to Taub and American pragmatism, instead of the framework serving as a means to content, all content is judged by its contribution to the framework. It is hard to believe anyone can treat such ideas seriously. Modernism is revealed here as postmodernism wrapped in cellophane—and only verbally so.

Even in the way Taub describes this process, one can easily discern the traits of analyticity. He describes the unfolding of values, not their grounding. In the fifth gate we saw that this is a distinctly analytic characteristic: reductionism. In addition, as we saw in the previous passage, all the “values” here are manifestly instrumental.

One can also see the absurdity of such a position from another angle. Is it conceivable that someone who fundamentally believes in universal values would alter his philosophical position and adopt value-relativism in order to achieve moral ends? Can such a system even be called a value system? This is the same subordination of beliefs and values to pragmatic ends that we found above.

It is completely clear that only someone who beforehand did not truly believe in the absolute standing of values—someone who in our terminology here is called an analytic thinker—could have joined American pragmatism, that is, could begin to examine values by their outcomes, meaning by their effect on democracy. The very concept of “value,” in its original meaning, no longer exists in such a pragmatist-analytic world.⁸

In the previous gate we saw, and here we see it again, that the postmodernists and the P.C. camp are precisely the rational, consistent, intellectually honest part of this group. They were willing to draw courageously the genuine conclusions required by “modernist” Enlightenment. Taub and his friends are unwilling to do that. They entrench themselves in their impossible position and turn postmodern doubt into a pseudo-positive certainty.

Whoever examines values by their results, as Dewey, Taub, and the P.C. camp all do, presupposes an analytic position according to which there is no other way to examine values, just as there is no other way to examine anything else. Once again we see that analyticity lay at the foundation of modernism; it did not sprout out of it as a wild growth. Anyone who thinks values are ends and not means cannot choose values by their results; one cannot even address him with absurd demands like those of American pragmatism—that he change his values in order to obtain a more moral and comfortable world.

The very fact that none of us immediately notices the absurdity of the approach of Dewey and the like points more than anything else to the deep penetration of analyticity into our culture. If Taub can preach to the P.C. camp that they have lost the restraints provided by belief in democracy, then clearly he too judges values by their outcomes. To this they will answer that if one is already choosing a criterion for values, and values have no validity of their own, then this criterion is not acceptable to them. This is especially so in light of what we saw above: setting criteria for values is a self-contradictory demand from the outset.

To be sure, anyone who tries to extract from the pseudo-intellectual slurry of the P.C. camp a grounding for moral principles does indeed deserve the lash of Taub’s criticism. Anyone who accepts the basic position that values can be chosen pragmatically in order to achieve moral or other goals ought to examine whether his choice of relativism actually delivers the desired goods. If it leads to granting legitimacy to murder in the name of family honor, or any other motive, then he really ought to re-adopt “values” that will provide the goods more reliably. Thus the dispute between Taub and his postmodern friends is an internal dispute within the postmodern-pragmatist movement: which values should be adopted in order to attain goals we all want to attain. Contrary to Taub’s declarations, there is no essential difference here.

We can say more than that. There is no principled difference between choosing values on pragmatist grounds and choosing them arbitrarily. Philosophically and logically, it is exactly the same thing. It is therefore clear that the “modernism” proposed by Taub is nothing but postmodernism, perhaps somewhat softer than usual.

Later we shall point out that, in the eyes of those who hold the synthetic position, intuitive understanding and common sense have a prior and deeper status than any other rational consideration. The correlation that Taub identifies as a mistake, the one linking P.C. positions to liberalism, stems from an intuitive and unconscious—but entirely precise—understanding on the part of the punditry and the public, the two factors that “err” in this according to Taub: the two positions do indeed have an identical root—analyticity. As noted, the difference to which Taub points is not as significant as he himself thinks.

One should note that the passage quoted here contains an admission from the parties themselves. The spiritual fathers of American democracy admit that democracy is a substitute meant to prevent the existence and spread of absolute values—or of certainty in general. And this is asserted by someone who defines himself as a modernist liberal in his critique of postmodernity.

This is further evidence that the liberal-secular-synthetic type probably does not really exist. Its own “values” are framework “values” that are not values in the accepted sense, and in fact constitute an antithesis to absolute values as such. Here there is a clear statement by an avowed secular modernist that he fears absolute values—and more than that: his whole world of values exists in order to prevent their emergence and spread.

If this is the secular-modernist alternative to religious syntheticity, then we have found clear proof of our basic claim: secularism contains within itself, in one form or another, an essential absence of certainty—or in our terminology, analyticity.

Any reader who feels that the identification of secularism and the left with postmodernity is overly sweeping, or unjustified in his personal case, is invited to examine himself on this axis as well. What are the values in which he believes, and for which he is prepared to struggle? Are they positive and active, or negative and passive, consisting merely in not causing harm? How certain is he of their truth, and do they possess universal-objective meaning? Are they not framework “values,” serving as instruments for attaining more basic ends? Someone who, despite being secular, can answer these questions in the synthetic direction probably belongs to that very small minority of secular people who genuinely hold modernist positions—that is, synthetic positions, not spurious modernist, analytic ones.

Summary

Taub correctly criticizes the P.C. camp, which tries to ground morality in nihilism. One of his criticisms is that they offer no alternative way of acting to the behavior they criticize. As we have seen, Taub himself, who serves here as a faithful mouthpiece for “modernist” liberalism, offers no real alternative to what the P.C. camp proposes. The “values” of democracy, freedom, and equality, which are framework “values,” cannot fulfill that role. It follows that the original modernists held a spurious synthetic position, and were in fact analytic. Spurious modernism carried postmodernism within itself as its legitimate child, not as a bastard. This is the natural and self-evident direction of development for one who wishes to remain “enlightened” and yet also consistent. Nietzsche was right.

Literary Intermezzo: What Does Borges Have to Do with All This?

To conclude this gate, it will be both interesting and amusing to read a passage from one of Borges’s most brilliant stories, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. The story describes a plot by a gang of idealists—that is, people who do not believe in the objective reality of things—led by Bishop Berkeley, himself an idealist philosopher, who live in a world that is itself imaginary, since they created it, called Tlön, and seek to take over our real world. The following fantastic description is part of an encyclopedic account of that Tlön. It is a sharp and incisive portrayal of the analytic-conventionalist world. A careful reading will reveal that this description contains almost all the elements, down to the smallest details, that we have discussed—at least on the logical-epistemological plane.⁹

Hume settled once and for all that Berkeley’s arguments leave no room for any answer and are not convincing in the least. With regard to the earth, this statement is entirely true; in Tlön it is entirely false. The nations of that planet are, by their very nature, idealists. Their language and all its derivatives—religion, literature, metaphysics—are founded upon idealism. For them the world is not a combination of objects in space but a heterogeneous series of separate acts; it is successive and temporal, not spatial. There are no nouns in Tlön’s conjectural Ursprache, its primordial language, from which the “present” languages and dialects derive; there are verbs without subjects, inflected by means of monosyllabic prefixes or suffixes with the force of adverbs. For example: there is no word corresponding to the word “moon,” but there is a verb whose sense in Spanish would be “to moon” or “to moonate.” “The moon rose above the river” would be said: “hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö,” which in order means: “upward behind the ongoing flow it mooned.”

What has been said above refers to the languages of the southern hemisphere. In the languages of the northern hemisphere, regarding whose Ursprache there is only scant information in the eleventh volume, the primary unit is not the verb but the monosyllabic adjective. The noun is formed from a cluster of adjectives. One does not say “moon”; one says “airy-bright above dark-round,” or “orange-faint-of-sky,” or some other combination. In the example I have chosen, the cluster of adjectives designates a real object; that fact is wholly accidental. In the literature of this hemisphere, as in Meinong’s world of subsistent essences, ideal objects are common, summoned up and dissolved in an instant according to the needs of the work. They are sometimes defined by simultaneity alone. There are objects composed of two elements, one visual and one auditory: the color of the newborn day and the cry of a distant bird… These second-degree objects can join with others; thanks to certain abbreviations, the process is almost infinite. There are celebrated poems all of which consist of one enormous word. That word constitutes a single poetic object created by the author. The fact that no one believes in the reality of nouns causes, paradoxically, their number to be infinite. The languages of Tlön’s northern hemisphere contain all the nouns of the Indo-European languages—and many more besides.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that Tlön’s classical culture contains only one field: psychology. All the rest are subordinate to it…

This monism, or absolute idealism, invalidates science. To explain, or to judge, a fact means to link it to another fact…

What happens to nouns in the northern hemisphere happens also to philosophies. The fact that every philosophy is regarded from the outset as a dialectical game, a kind of philosophy of the “as if,” has contributed to their multiplication. There is an abundance of unbelievable systems, graceful in their architecture or sensational in their character. Tlön’s metaphysicians do not seek truth, nor even probability: they seek surprise. In their eyes, metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature…

Many features of conventionalist postmodernism appear in this passage, and I leave it to the reader to be impressed by this astonishing and brilliant literary description. Any addition could only detract.

Surprising as it may sound, in a certain sense this fictional description is nothing other than a faithful portrayal of the world in which we live, at least as it is perceived in the virtual world of analytic thinkers.¹⁰

Summary of the Discussion in This Gate

In this gate we examined the modernist-liberal position, and saw that in fact it serves as a cover for soft postmodernism. Its values are merely framework-values, which we called “values,” as distinct from values without quotation marks.

The salient characteristics of these positions are an instrumentalist approach to values and, in one broader word, pragmatism.

The “Copernican revolution” carried out by the modernists, in which they grant framework-values the force of complete certainty and the status of substantive values, stems from that broader phenomenon described in the previous gates: the search for an anchor of certainty in a world without a coordinate system. Pragmatism is one response to this need, but it is not a genuine philosophical alternative to a substantive value system, and therefore it does not provide a real answer to the analytic predicament. That predicament cannot have a substantive answer.

As matters presently appear, all liberal, secular, left-wing positions are in fact analytic. Their different shades mostly conceal inconsistency or differences that are not essential. The only consistent worldview for an analytic person is postmodern skepticism, like that expressed by Dani Rabinowitz in Haaretz—see the first quotation above from Taub’s book.

This is a description of the analytic person’s emptiness on the plane of values and ideas. Analytic society is not necessarily less moral. But it is empty of philosophical grounding for its values—or its “values.” In the third section we shall examine this same phenomenon on the abstract philosophical plane. There we shall see that there is no real possible answer to the analytic distress of Taub and his friends.

Footnotes

It seems to me that the argument presented here underlies the renewed flowering of mysticism after its suppression in the positivist age. A person seeks to connect with entities outside himself so that they may give his life meaning. As stated, this cannot be done from within. This is another aspect of the explanation offered in the previous gate, where I argued that a person seeks certainty, that is, release from analyticity.

It is interesting to note that many tend to explain religious faith specifically in terms of the satisfaction it gives the believer—“opium for the masses.” Here we see that the picture is exactly the reverse. The believer arrives at his faith for philosophical reasons, whereas the analytic thinker is forced to deteriorate into various dubious beliefs because of psychological motives of this sort. Above we already saw, in paraphrase of Marx, that liberalism is the real “opium” of the masses.