Proverbial

My only experience with the oeuvre of Jean Baudrillard was reading The Transparency of Evil for a Communication Theory class in college. But spending five years surrounded by professors enamored of anything written by someone with a French surname (Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, Mafesoli, Virilio et al.) meant having some contact with the whole idea of postmodernism.

Lisa Galarneau, over at Terra Nova, decided to pay a homage to Baudrillard in tribute to his passing away last tuesday. What she ended up accomplishing, though, was a critique of his excessive pessimism. In fact, she summed up all my gripes with postmodernist thinking in one sentence, noting how “I’m becoming more and more of a luddite as I type“.

The fact is that, as one of the very few good teachers I had in college said, in essence postmodernism is an anti-modernist school of thought. In their overtly pessimistic view of how media and technology have turned our reality into a simulacrum, postmodernists are actually longing for the good ole’ days of yore, complaining about the chaos and lack of values of current society just as conservatives like Leo Strauss and Georges Bataille did before them.

Meanwhile, technology has helped diminish poverty in the world, make people live longer and better, and bring cultures and societies closer to each other in a way unfathomable only a couple of decades ago. So yes, there’s plenty of room for improvement, but forgive me if I don’t think anachronistic luddites are the ones that we should be listening to for advice.