Fernando Alcoforado*
This article aims to address the postmodernity that emerged after the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989), the collapse of the Soviet Union (1991) and the crisis of ideologies in western societies in the late twentieth century in order to deconstruct Modernity and the Enlightenment that arose in the eighteenth century, as well as the post-truth that arose in the contemporary era for the purpose of reversing the meaning of things and making the lie true. Today’s world is characterized by the threat to the critical rationality advocated by the Enlightenment and Modernity with the advent of postmodernity and post-truth that represent a setback for the progress of humanity. It is a huge challenge for humanity to defeat the ominous political and ideological influence of postmodernity and post-truth.
- The advent of postmodernity
The failure of the Enlightenment and Modernity in achieving the progress of humanity and the achievement of happiness for human beings paved the way for the advent of Post-Modernity that represents a cultural reaction to the loss of confidence in the universal potential of the Enlightenment and Modernity project. Postmodernity therefore means a reaction to what is modern. While Modernity can be characterized as the age of valorization and belief in the notions of truth, reason, objectivity and determinism, unshakable faith in scientific progress and universal emancipation, Postmodernity puts all of this in question.
Jean-François Lyotard states in La condition postmoderne, rapport sur le savoir that Postmodernity is a consequence of the death of the totalizing “grand narratives” of Modernity, founded on the belief in progress and on the Enlightenment ideals of equality, liberty and fraternity. Lyotard protests against the format of the “grand narrative” that dominates the modernist portrait of history. This grand narrative, according to Lyotard, falsely indicates that much of what is useful in history originated in the Enlightenment, which since the Enlightenment humanity has progressed cognitively rapidly, as well as in terms of freedom, equality and fraternity (LYOTARD, Jean-François. La condition postmoderne, rapport sur le savoir. Paris: Minuit, 1979).
In Postmodernity, the constructed world of durable objects has been replaced by that of products available and designed for immediate obsolescence and disposal. Postmodernity can be characterized as a reaction to culture to the way in which the ideals of modernity have historically developed, associated with the loss of optimism and confidence in the universal potential of the Enlightenment and modern project. It is a rejection of the attempt of colonization by science and technology of the other spheres of human life. Postmodernity takes criticism to its deepest consequences by questioning the concepts established by Modernity.
Zygmunt Bauman affirms that the men of Modernity lived in a space-time solid, durable, hard container in which human acts could be considered safe. Freedom was the known need, but also the decision to act with that knowledge. The structure was in its place. For postmodernity men and women, however, this world has disappeared. As Bauman points out, the world in which man is living is made up of rules that are made and redone in the course of events themselves. To live in this world you need to make the most of your skills. The world has become more fragile and dangerous. Many of the relationships that permeate the contemporary world are not lasting [BAUMAN, Zygmunt. O mal-estar da pós-modernidade (The malaise of postmodernity). Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar. 1998].
Post-modernity is therefore defined by many authors as the age of uncertainty, fragmentation, deconstruction, and the exchange of values. In relation to Post-Modernity, Lyotard states in La condition postmoderne, rapport sur le savoir that what is underway is a dismantling and successive reconstruction of institutions, which often makes human ties very fluid. Post-modernity also makes our current historical period a “patchwork”, a “mosaic” of epochs, periods and historical situations that coexist as, for example, characteristics of the Middle Ages in certain regions of a country living with the capitalism of the contemporary era.
- The ideology and politics of postmodernity
Under the influence of Karl Marx, a German philosopher, the word ideology has become widely used in the human sciences of our time with the meaning of a system of ideas that elaborates an understanding of reality to hide the dominance of one group over the other. In this sense, ideology has functions such as preserving class domination by providing a soothing explanation for social differences. Its goal is to avoid open conflict between dominators and dominated. One can understand the implicit or explicit function of ideology in the attempt of the ruling social classes to make the particular point of view of the classes that exercise political domination appear to all social and political subjects as universal, and not as the particular interest of a given social class.
The questions concerning the Enlightenment, Modernity and Postmodernity fall into the field of ideology. Through ideology, imaginary and logical social identities are constructed whose function is to conceal the conflict between social classes, to conceal class domination and to hide the presence of the particular, giving it the appearance of universal. Ideological discourse is characterized by an imaginary construction in the sense of images of the unity of the social, through which it provides social and political subjects with a space for action that must necessarily provide coherent representations to explain social reality and present coherent norms to guide practice politics.
Postmodernity is a powerful ideological weapon of neoliberal market capitalism and globalization by incorporating a form of production of the social imaginary that corresponds to the aspirations of the ruling class as the most effective means of social control and the alleviation of class conflicts, whether by reversing the notion of cause and effect, either by silencing issues that therefore prevent the worker from becoming aware of his historical condition, forming false ideas about himself, what he is or should be. Postmodern ideologues argue that we would be in a new, postmodern age in which past theorizations that made their arguments from the industrial logic, factory, about capital, capitalism, value, productive labor, revolutionary proletariat, etc., would no longer be valid. In other words, the death of Modernity would imply the death of Karl Marx’s thought, as well as any totalizing meta-narrative. Thus, in the conception of what would be the post-industrial society, postmodernism passes for the negation of all totalizing perspective and for the affirmation of fragmentation, discontinuous and chaotic.
Postmodernity, as a theoretical and political movement, involved diffuse but influential forces with youth and various social movements. The aim was to deconstruct the discourse of revolutionary political parties, the trade union movement, and Marxism itself as the theoretical synthesis of the social revolution. For the followers of Postmodernity, discourses on broad themes such as equality, socialism, human emancipation, the historical values of the proletariat, collective solutions to human oppression, were a thing of the past and the product of a world that was already no longer existed. In place of these old themes, a new discourse was presented, as a way to recognize the fragmentation of reality and knowledge, the finding of the difference, the emergence of new social subjects, with specific characteristics, values and demands, such as social movements, gender, race, ethnicity, etc., and new forms of struggle, including renouncing the seizure of power.
The end of the centrality of work is one of the most prominent themes of postmodernists with the argument that information technology, productive restructuring and the accelerated insertion of science in the productive process have made the concept of the working class and proletariat obsolete, even because these actors are becoming residuals in a globalized world where robotics, the internet and advanced computing rule. Based on the argument that the working class is shrinking worldwide, postmodernists even said goodbye to the proletariat, which would be a typical concept of the Second Industrial Revolution. It is a tremendous mistake not to consider that the more society is modernized, the more it inserts science and technology into production and the broader its organic composition of capital, the more it puts downward pressure on profit rates. Hence capitalism cannot exist without its counterpoint, the proletariat that is the source of its profit. If capitalism automates all its factories, the system would collapse, because robots are more disciplined than humans, able to work without rest, claim no pay, or strike, but also have their Achilles heel: they don’t consume goods and services. If it has no consumers, capitalists have no one to sell their goods to. That is, with full automation, the system will collapse due to its own contradictions.
Many of the advocates of Postmodernity also falsely advocate the end of social classes, so that postindustrial society would be, at the same time, and for the same reasons, a post classist society. Postmodernity would thus be the result of the defeat of real socialism, that is, of the defeat of a meta-narrative that proposed an alternative to the capitalist order. Neoliberal capitalism would all need to recognize it as an undisputed reality against which totalizing alternatives could not be constructed. What to face in this new postmodern age? How to act coherently before the world? The postmodern answer is that we should not try to engage in any global project.
The signs of Post-Modernity are clearly present in the political field with its attitude contrary to the idea of revolution as a necessary passport for the construction of a “new society” “without classes” and “without inequality”, of a “new man” and “collective happiness at the national and world levels”. The argument against the revolution is based on the fact that the revolutions that led to real socialism resulted in totalitarianism, economic failure and disappointment of the population forced to live with the lack of freedom.
The option offered by Postmodernity from the political point of view to the peoples of the world is limited to the following alternatives: 1) capitulation / resignation / conformism to the historical victory of neoliberal globalized capitalism; or, 2) admits contestation of the current order, but not from a totalizing, global perspective that leads to the replacement of capitalism, but from a fragmented perspective of struggles. The practical posture of postmodernism is not to challenge the capitalist logic as it really is. Deliberately, Postmodernity defends the thesis that it is impossible to contest a victorious system that is here to stay, neoliberal capitalism.
- Postmodern political action and the advent of post-truth
Postmodern political action, disbelieving traditional political action (political parties, unions, election of representatives, etc.), aims to encourage voluntary actions through NGOs, as well as more or less spontaneous acts by groups and individuals who invest, for example, in improving the health of society. There are also pro-education actions to reduce traffic violence, environmental pro-education actions, the fight to end smoking and drugs, the participation in actions against hunger, the provision of services to eliminate illiteracy, etc., all of them postmodern inspiration. Postmodern ideology is responsible for a large part of the defeats of social movements in these two decades around the world because by influencing a good part of youth and leaders of social movements to act under a fragmented perspective of struggles, it is leading to the frustration of thousands of fighters social because these struggles have a growth trajectory in the beginning and it weakens until they are canceled with the evolution of time as they have happened in Brazil and in the world.
Postmodernism is the ideological fetish typical of neoliberal times and represents the petty-bourgeois ideology of sophisticated submission to the order of capital. All who follow this ritual, directly or indirectly, are subordinating themselves to neoliberal ideology in the service of national and international financial capital, giving up an emancipatory project and concealing their powerlessness through a discourse full of sociological abstractions, but very convenient for capital. That is why they combat general struggles to fragment them into specific struggles that do not openly confront the dominant system.
Postmodern political action of the contemporary era is also using what is called post-truth to gain public opinion through the use of fake news. Nowadays, the term “post-truth” has gained great importance in society. Chosen as the word of the year by the Oxford Dictionary, it is conceptualized post-truth as denoting circumstances in which objective facts have less influence to gain public opinion than appeal to emotion or personal beliefs. The prefix “post” means to indicate that it is not a truth of the past in the temporal sense, but in the sense that the truth has been eclipsed (MCINTYRE, Lee. Post-Truth. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018). The truth of the facts,
incessantly sought in the past by the media for the reliability of the message conveyed, security, impartiality, and editorial independence, among others, has lost focus, giving significant space to fake news, half-truths, and hasty conclusions obtained through total disregard for evidence and proofs.
Reversing the meaning of things and making the lie true with fake news has been a devastating way to reach society. This is the phenomenon of posttruth. The driving force behind the new post-truth phenomenon is social media. Such mechanisms provide any individual with the possibility of mass dissemination of untruthful information, that is, without any foundation. Aftertruth is attributed to Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election and Brexit’s victory in the United Kingdom [D´ANCONA, Matthew. Pós-verdade (Post-truth). Barueri: Faro Editorial, 2018]. The same can be attributed to the victory of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil’s presidential election that spread lies that were admitted as truth by the electorate. It is well known that the consequences for society can be devastating. Currently, Brazil has witnessed calamitous situations, based on the disclosure of personal images and reports of barbarity against people, giving rise to public commotion evidenced in the news, without even the possibility of contradictory and broad defense by the affected person.
The post-truth rests on the nihilism of Friedrich Nietzsche, who was the philosopher of Nazism. When talking about nihilism, it is common to understand that it is the denial of any values. Nietzsche takes the term to an extreme path when he considers nihilism the denial of life. What is life for Nietzsche? Life is domination, violence, self-assertion, it is the exercise of strength, it is disconnecting from the flock and individualizing, it is facing the world openly and not being deceived with false beliefs, it is loving the world as it is. The nihilist is one who ceases to live in the now in favor of a supposed future life (in a Christian paradise or in an ideal society). For a nihilist there is no absolute truth and everything is relative [NIETZSCHE, Friedrich. Obras incompletas (Incomplete works). São Paulo: Abril Cultural, 1978]. The issue of post-truth relates to Nietzsche’s view that “there are no facts, only versions”. The search for the supposed truth takes second place.
The nihilistic view is that no one accesses the essence of events themselves in their entirety and complexity. The understanding is that there are no objective facts, because every fact, as an event perceived by man, is subjective. Human beings grasp events, temporal events, through their senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch) and transform this information into language. Only then, when translating events into language, do you have facts. Every fact is an interpretation of the event, a human “manipulation” of it, there being no objective fact, but only objective elements of the temporal event that will necessarily pass through human subjectivity to enter its perception and communication. If there is any truth, it is not of this plan. At the current level of consciousness of the human being, he can only grasp limited perspectives of phenomena and objects. The nihilistic view thus starts from the premise that truth, that understood as the correspondence between fact in language and event, between what one says and what one actually has, does not exist on Earth. For the nihilist, if there is no such correspondence, there is no truth as conceived throughout human history.
According to the nihilist view, there is also no relative truth, as there is no correspondence between the fact thought in language by one person and that thought by another. Each person shapes his reality in a way, even if subjected to objective events in himself, he is always subject to the subjectivity of each human being, however simple the events may be. Friedrich Nietzsche’s nihilistic view of the world is therefore extremely complex: neither tied to a supposed objective realism nor to a supposed subjectivism. It is the social (subjective) and natural (objective) patterns that allow the (always subjective) construction of information and language communication from events (themselves objective). That said, the manipulation of facts, or events translated into language, which are human constructions, has always existed, whether consciously or unconsciously, but has reached levels never seen in the history of humanity in the contemporary era with the advent of post-truth.
The idea of post-truth is therefore a misunderstanding of how man relates to the world, how he builds information and communicates. What is worse is that it reinforces the inadequate classic idea of truth, leading to the belief that there would be objective facts denied by people because of their beliefs, which does not happen exactly that way. Everyone builds facts influenced by their beliefs, especially political ones, and the more passion, the easier the manipulation. Objective and irrefutable facts at a given historical moment are almost always denied. This is true even of the natural sciences, physics, astronomy, such as geocentrism, which were later denied. The philosopher Nietzsche, even before this happened, already said in the book Além do Bem e do Mal (Beyond Good and Evil) that “Physics, too, is only an interpretation and arrangement of the world (according to ourselves!), not a explanation of the world ”[NIETZSCHE, Friedrich. Além do bem e do mal (Beyond good and evil). Porto Alegre: L&PM Editores. 2008].
The search for scientific truth, the use of formal logic and the study of methods have been very important for the advances in human knowledge made in the last centuries, including for the technological development that has allowed an improvement of life in the general population. Belief in a single, objective truth is, however, one of the main causes of conflict of all kinds, as it leads to distancing among men, to a notion that there is something true to be discovered by every human being. This individualistic view of knowledge leads to the closure of each individual from the other’s views. Each one thinks that he is the holder of the truth and, therefore, would be able to attack the others who are against him, because, associated with this detention of the truth, is often the detention of the good, the right doing.
- Conclusions
The disappearance in today’s world of the last reserves of critical rationality advocated by the Enlightenment and Modernity, which have been degraded in successive processes of self-destruction over time, paved the way for postmodernity, which contributes to the increase in the ordeal to which they are subjected human beings and also represents a gigantic threat to the progress of humanity. Given this fact, it is an immense challenge for contemporary thinkers to establish new paradigms and new values of rational behavior to be formulated for human society in the present age to defeat the ominous political and ideological influence of postmodernity that, according to their ideologues, there are no truths, that all previous systems were wrong and that nothing can be known. Contemporary thinkers need to mobilize in reinventing a new Enlightenment project as did eighteenth-century thinkers to build a new world that would end humanity’s ordeal.
In addition to combating postmodernity in all its dimensions, it is also necessary to confront post-truth. Faced with the threat to humanity’s progress posed by post-truth, it is a huge challenge for humanity to defeat it. The post-truth that comes with fake news is part of the ominous political and ideological influence of postmodernity that, according to its ideologues, there are no truths and nothing can be known. If we want to improve the truth-working media as opposed to fake news, we must strongly support it, and if we want to combat the post-truth, we need to fight the media that disseminates fake news by denouncing it. False news must be fought to prevent it from thriving by contrasting it immediately and strongly with the truth of the facts for the sake of truth. If we realize that there are lies that must be fought for the benefit of society, their confrontation depends on each of us who advocate for the truth to prevail.
* Fernando Alcoforado, 80, awarded the medal of Engineering Merit of the CONFEA / CREA System, member of the Bahia Academy of Education, engineer and doctor in Territorial Planning and Regional Development by the University of Barcelona, university professor and consultant in the areas of strategic planning, business planning, regional planning and planning of energy systems, is author of the books Globalização (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 1997), De Collor a FHC- O Brasil e a Nova (Des)ordem Mundial (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 1998), Um Projeto para o Brasil (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 2000), Os condicionantes do desenvolvimento do Estado da Bahia (Tese de doutorado. Universidade de Barcelona,http://www.tesisenred.net/handle/10803/1944, 2003), Globalização e Desenvolvimento (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 2006), Bahia- Desenvolvimento do Século XVI ao Século XX e Objetivos Estratégicos na Era Contemporânea (EGBA, Salvador, 2008), The Necessary Conditions of the Economic and Social Development- The Case of the State of Bahia (VDM Verlag Dr. Müller Aktiengesellschaft & Co. KG, Saarbrücken, Germany, 2010), Aquecimento Global e Catástrofe Planetária (Viena- Editora e Gráfica, Santa Cruz do Rio Pardo, São Paulo, 2010), Amazônia Sustentável- Para o progresso do Brasil e combate ao aquecimento global (Viena- Editora e Gráfica, Santa Cruz do Rio Pardo, São Paulo, 2011), Os Fatores Condicionantes do Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2012), Energia no Mundo e no Brasil- Energia e Mudança Climática Catastrófica no Século XXI (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2015), As Grandes Revoluções Científicas, Econômicas e Sociais que Mudaram o Mundo (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2016), A Invenção de um novo Brasil (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2017), Esquerda x Direita e a sua convergência (Associação Baiana de Imprensa, Salvador, 2018, em co-autoria) and Como inventar o futuro para mudar o mundo (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2019).
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