When Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind in 1987, he described an American academy awash in postmodern relativism. Universities, rather than pushing students to find the truth, were inculcating the moral virtue of “openness,” such that the only belief that united anyone was that truth is relative. “What right,” Bloom described students perpetually asking, “do I or anyone else have to say one opinion is better than the others?” Postmodern academics themselves were aware of the phenomenon. In a 2004 essay in the journal Critical Inquiry, social theorist Bruno Latour noted, “Entire PhD programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up.”
...Today’s students, the products of generations of postmodern relativism at every level of American education, are not the amoral hedonists that conservatives feared (a new study published in Child Development showed that teens are having sex, dating and drinking less than they used to). But neither are students the peaceful coexistors that progressives hoped for: One in five students now say that it’s acceptable to use violence to disrupt a controversial speaker. Indeed, campuses today are typified by the opposite of relativism: a new moral positivism. Young people are now comfortable asserting proscriptive norms and calling out rule-breakers, creating a taboo-laden culture that few anticipated.
...Knocking down external truths doesn’t breed peace. It turns society into a field of conflict between personal truths that compete against one another with less and less restraint. It creates social conditions that reward extremism, which becomes a useful adaptation in a Hobbesian moral landscape. Peace, it turns out, comes from hegemonic values — on agreement between us about what is true.
Postmodernism was supposed to liberate us from myths masquerading as facts. The problem is that a society can achieve nothing — including liberty, including social justice — without collective trust. And trust depends on fellow citizens feeling bound together by shared truths, values, and, yes, myths. Without them, society atomizes and degenerates into a war of all against all, an agglomeration of “selves” seeking to project power — the only truth that postmodernism knows. If we’d prefer to have a society instead of scorched earth, we must agree to be bound by truths and values and myths that lie outside ourselves. These truths and values and myths will be imperfect, they will be contingent, and they will be ripe for critique. But if we decide they don’t exist at all, soon enough, neither will we.